An Exercise in Worldmaking 2021-2022

Preface

In 2004, in a moment of despair caused by her global, national and local political context, Toni Morrison wrote:

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for selfpity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilisations heal”

It is important to remember that Morrison wrote this as a result of her friend’s guidance and support. Being an international student in a country that has not reconciled with or fully confronted its colonial, homophobic, transphobic and racist legacy can be challenging. As Masters’ students at the International Institute of Social Studies, we came together in the fall of 2022 from various social, academic, professional, political and cultural backgrounds. A few of us escaped war and violence. Some of us raised children, still others gave birth.

But many of us were not fully aware of the challenges that would come in a Dutch context. The few Dutch among us graciously offered resources and support- ways of potentially mitigating the challenges that came with this opportunity. Yet, we were often struck by moments of unanticipated exclusion and marginalisation in The Netherlands. Like Morrison, learned to lean on one another, to create and to experiment as we tried to make sense of the contexts we were leaving as well as the contexts we were entering into.

Of course, Dutch society was not the only challenge we faced. We also dealt with the uncertainty of COVID-19. We held on to our chairs as 80 kilometre per hour winds whipped through Den Haag. We listened to our brave colleagues share their experiences on International Women’s Day. We grappled with failures in our own institution’s policies as well as contentious moments in European and international politics.

We also celebrated. We celebrated as our institution turned 70. We hopped on trains, buses, and planes to embark on study trips across Europe. We sang karaoke in the Butterfly Bar and breathed a collective sigh of relief as we finally submitted our theses. Through moments of jubilation and exasperation, we are here.

Our writing cannot be detached from this context. It was inspired by our experiences, by our professors, by those who came before us and by those who could not be here with us. The essays in this collection are a reflection of this lineage. From moments of personal and collective hardship, we have crafted an opportunity to learn, to reflect, to critique, to resist, and to heal.

The selection process for this collection is, of course, biased and subjective. While we strove to include every ISS major and continent present in our batch to ensure that the diversity of ISS was genuinely represented in the selected papers, we could only select 19 essays from the 46 ISS faculty submitted. Undoubtedly, our decisions reflect our preferences. However, we worked hard through thisprocesstoselectessaysthatwefeltwereinnovative,reflexiveandrepresentativeofthecollective learning and unlearning that ISS aspires to.

We publish this bearing in mind how the ‘formal’ references included in these essays can never capture the many conversations, brainstorms and imaginings that occur over kibbeling in the ISS atrium, between sips of subpar coffee in the lobby or after uncertain glances at a Dorus laundry machine that stutters through turns. Writing is never an individual process. As such, we hope that in publishing this collection, we might also recognise and embrace how our individual accomplishments and journeys are inseparable from our collective one.

At the same time, we would also like to thank one individual who has made this collection possible. Namely, Drs. Peter Bardoel (ISS faculty) headed the editing team and despite personal challenges, offered constructive feedback and guidance. Thank you for reading and reflecting on this collective Exercise in World Making. We hope you enjoy reading these essays as much as we did.

Sincerely,

The Student Editors and Cover Graphic Designers of the 2021/2022 Exercise in World Making for the ISS Masters Programme in Development Studies: Inés Jiménez Rodríguez, Daniel R. Soucy, Chomprang Wongrusmeeduan, Rebecca Mort, Mariela Miranda van Iersel, Niyati Pingali, Lívia Sá Dos Santos Souza, Chelsea Ellingsen, Karen Nabwire Kilwake, and Tigist Gebermarian Yohannes.

Reference

Morrison, T. (2015) “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear.” The Nation Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/ (Accessed 8 December 2022).

Acknowledgements

Appreciation goes to all the ISS students, batch of 2021/2022 for the efforts you each put into this academic year. The editorial team was headed by Drs. Peter Bardoel (ISS Faculty). The editing team appreciates his time and effort. Many thanks to each editor for their feedback, thoughts, and contributions. We also offer a special thanks to Livia Sá Dos Santos Souza and Tigist Gebermarian Yohannes for the graphic design of the internal pages and front/back covers.

Many thanks also to the ISS teaching faculty for supporting and endorsing such high-quality essays from their courses. You made our job immensely difficult but also exciting by submitting these diverse and interesting writings. Appreciation also goes to ISS Marketing and ISS Library staff for the support towards publishing this compilation on the ISS website.

One final thank you to those past, present and future writers and thinkers who we have collaborated with, learned from, and been inspired by. We may never fully recognise each person who has influenced this work. Our knowledge and reflection is truly a collective task.

Acknowledgements ...........................................................................................................................................................4

Contents 5

India’s School Feeding Programme: Implications for Distribution and Social Equity Anoushka Gupta, India 8

The Connection Between Poverty Concepts and Poverty Reduction Strategies: The Case of China Lai Junhao, China 17

Peace in the Middle East as Represented by Times Magazine Mira Zaghbour, Lebanon 28

When Advocacy Perpetuates Systemic Violence: A Critique of National Movements Contesting the Criminalisation of Youth Access to Gender-Affirming Care Daniel Soucy, USA ...........................................................................................................................................................34

The Sarayaku Peoples: A Long Fight to Reclaim Their Rights Fernanda González Ronquillo, Ecuador..........................................................................................................................44

Sacrifice Zones in Chile: Contestations and Possible Reconfigurations of the Neoliberal Development Model Mariela Miranda van Iersel, Chile ..................................................................................................................................52

Building a Care System for Chile with the Communities at the Centre Amparo Arias Bravo, Chile 59

Crafting Heritage and Reimagining Development With The Simon’s Town Museum Rebecca Mort, South Africa 67

Decolonisation Therapy for Tears beyond the Icy Mountain in Northern Myanmar Seng Bu, Myanmar 74

A Politico-Ecological Interrogation of Class-based Analyses of Green Grabbing Inés Jiménez Rodríguez, Spain 82

‘Paper and Glue’: An Alternative to Mainstream Development Marta Richero, Italy 93

Inclusive human development in Awura Amba community: A post-Development perspective Yilikal M. Engida, Ethiopia 101

Degrowth and the Circular Economy: Incorporation that Makes a Better World Rafiatu Abdul-Salam, Ghana 106

Who is ‘right’ here? Who is ‘quiet’ here? Archana R. Vikraman, India ..........................................................................................................................................113

Envisioning a Cultivation: Migration Through Anticolonial Archives and Rememories Estefania Padilla, Mexico / Switzerland.......................................................................................................................119

Revolution from Within: Placing Decolonial Healing at the Center of Political Struggle Rachelle Sartori, USA 129

Complementing the Idea of Conservation: Between Preserving and Green Grabbing, a case study: theIndigenous Community of Cirompang in Banten, Indonesia Nadia Gissma Kusumawardhani, Indonesia 139

The Hardest Stories to Tell are Your Own, but When Does a Story Truly Become Yours to Own? Mariya N. Khan, India 145

The Story Behind my Thesis: Plus-Size Black Women Healing from Anti-Blackness and Fatphobia Within the U.S Healthcare System and Society Nadia C.E. Ndiaye, Senegal / USA.................................................................................................................................151

India’s School Feeding Programme: Implications for Distribution and Social Equity

By Anoushka Gupta, India

“[The] persistence of hunger in many countries in the contemporary world is related not merely to agenerallackofaffluence,butalsotosubstantial oftenextreme inequalitieswithinthesociety” (Drèze and Sen, 1991, p.2)

Introduction

While 21st century India has advanced along many parameters, hunger, and malnutrition, particularly among children, continues to cast a blot on her “development” trajectory. In 2021, India’s position in the Global Hunger Index dropped 29,1 percentage points since 2000. Moreover, there was a decline in key child nutritional indicators according to the Government’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data comparing 2014-15 to 2019-20 (Seth and Jain, 2021). Indicator NFHS-4 (2014-15) NFHS-5 (2019-20) Children under 5 years with severe wasting (weight-for-height) (%)

7,5 7,7 Children aged 6-59 months who are anaemic (%) 58,6 67,1

Table 1: Key Child Nutritional Indicators. Source: Seth and Jain, 2021.

Successive Indian governments have attempted to respond to these alarming figures through formal policy measures. The National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013 granted citizens legal entitlements to safeguard their right to food and brought existing schemes such as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), Public Distribution System (PDS) under its ambit. “One of the guiding principles [of NFSA] is its life-cycle approach” (Department of Food and Public Distribution, n.d.) whereby food provisioning for children is allocated through ICDS and MDMS, while PDS targets eligible households through provision of subsidised food grains. Hence, unlike PDS which takes a clear ‘targeted’ approach based on predefined income thresholds, the programmes for children were envisioned as ‘universal’ policies, and without any attached conditionalities.

This essay seeks to map out the components of the MDMS with specific focus on Rajasthan state in North-Western India. The period of analysis will be restricted to the launch of the scheme up to 2020, before COVID-19 induced school closures pushed children into greater food insecurity. In the second section, the essay examines the extent to which social inequalities have been transformed in MDMS through an engagement with concepts such as social reproduction, rights-based discourse, and age-based classification of the scheme

Section I: Key features of MDMS

“Covering an estimated 120 million schoolchildren by 2006 (Khera, 2006), [MDMS] now is the largest school feeding program[me] in the world” (Singh et al., 2014, p. 275).

First launched in 1995, the scheme has evolved significantly since its inception. The changes include extending the scheme originally from children in primary school i.e. Standards 1 to 5 up-to upperprimary school i.e. Standards 6 to 8, and replacing provision of dry rations to one hot cooked meal per day (for a minimum of 200 days in a school year) as per nutritional standards specified by the Central government.

In addition to the stated objectives of MDMS as “enhancing enrollment, retention and attendanceand simultaneously improvingnutritionallevels among children,”(Ministryof Education [MoE], no date), Jean Drèze (2003) makes the case for the potential of MDMS to contribute to enhancing social equity. Specifically, he argues, “[m]id-day meals help to undermine caste prejudices, by teaching children to sit together and share acommonmeal.Theyalsofostergenderequity,byreducingthegendergapinschoolparticipation, providinganimportant source offemale employmentinrural areas,andliberatingworking women from the burden of having to feed children at home during the day” (Drèze, 2003, p. 4673).

Section II will delve deeper into some of these aspects under social equity. In terms of eligibility, the meal is provided free of cost to “all children studying in Government, Local Body and Government-aided primary and upper primary schools, Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS)/Alternate Inclusive Education centres, including Madarsas and Maqtabs” (MoE, n.d.) in Standards 1-8. In Rajasthan, this translated to 60% of all children in the age group 6-141 enrolled in government schools and 0,4% of children in the same age group in Madarsas and EGS’ in 2018 (Annual Status of Education Report [ASER], 2018).

Figure 1. Four States Received Their Entire Approved Budget for MDMS in 2018-2019. Source: Pandey and Kapur, 2020

Funding for MDMS is shared in a 60-40 ratio between Central and State governments respectively 2 Specifically, costs of payments to MDMS cooks, cooking, infrastructure is split between the two. The central government, however, supplies “grain (wheat or rice) …to the state governments free of charge” (Khera, 2006, p. 4743). Calculations are drawn up on a per child, per day basis. “As per revised cooking cost per child, per school day (with effect from 1 April 2018) the minimum allocation for primary schools was Rs. 4.35 ($0,05) …[and] for upper primary schools…was fixedat Rs. 6.51($0,08)perchild,perday. This was furtherrevisedto Rs.4.48($0.06)

1 The Right to Education Act, 2009 guarantees free and compulsory education to children aged 6-14. MoE documents stipulate that a child is expected to be age 6 in Standard 1 and age 14 in Standard 8

2 This applies to all states barring the 7 North-East Indian states where the ratio is 90-10 between the Centre and State

for primary schools and Rs. 6.71 ($0,09) for upper primary schools with effect from 1 April 2019” (Pandey and Kapur, 2020, p. 6).

It is important to draw a distinction between budgetary allocation, on one hand, and states receiving the stipulated amounts from the Centre and proceeding to utilise the funds, on the other. For example, while 81% of the allocated amount for MDMS was disbursed by the Centre to Rajasthan in 2018-19,thestatehad thehighest budget utilisationat110%compared to all otherstates in the same year. Further, there are instances of states, including Rajasthan, going beyond their budgetary allocation and paying additional sums from state funds towards implementing MDMS (Pandey and Kapur, 2020).

In terms of sources of provisioning, the State (both Central and State governments) plays a critical role in financing the scheme and ensuring last-mile service delivery of grain to schools. In addition to elected representatives and members of the bureaucracy who take care of financial and logistical functions, a key functionary of the state within MDMS is the teacher hired in government schools. Eventually, they are thefinal point onthe supply sideto physicallyoversee food distribution and exert a degree of subjectivity owing to this important function.

The local community environment is critical to MDMS in three important ways. First, cooks, usually women, hail from the area where the school is located. Second, in many states, additional food ingredients are sourced locally, and the meal is customised to dominant local eating norms. During fieldwork conducted by the author in Madhya Pradesh in 2019, the menu for the week was painted on a board outside the school (see image below). Here, the menu was entirely vegetarian, and roti (flatbread) and dal (Lentil soup) were cooked every day, in addition to some variation in the type of vegetables served. Caste and vegetarianism play a critical role in determining the menu in a particular area and food served varies as a result. For example, “Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Orissa, West Bengal and Jharkhand provide eggs to school students” (Prasanna, 2021).

Third, though the family is not captured in the formal outline of the policy, the role of parents and household members in mediating access to the MDMS with reference to caste has proven to be a major challenge, particularly in states like Rajasthan where caste hierarchies are extremely stringent.

The third source of provisioning in MDMS has increasingly come from civil society organisations in some states. Given that implementation is left to the state government, many have

Figure 2. School Lunch Menu in Bhopal District, Madhya Pradesh. Source: Gupta, 2021.

chosen to outsource cooking and distributing meals to specific organisations. In Rajasthan for example, Akshaya Patra, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), provided hot cooked meals to 4.428 schools and 231.187 children in a given year (Akshaya Patra, 2017). According to their website, the NGO performs the same function in 11 other states in India.

Finally, the market, through utilisation of Corporate Social Responsibility funds by large corporate companies, has also contributed towards MDMS. Havells India, best known for manufacturing fans, allocated Rs. 1,77 crore ($215.215,88) for a project through which hot cooked meals were provided to children in Alwar district in Rajasthan. The company website states that the project was piloted in 2005 and “started with serving just 1,500 children across 5 schools. [It] grew to serving over 60.000 students across 693 schools daily in the district” (Havells India, 2019).

Section II: Analysis

The analytical section focuses on the dimension of social equity within the MDMS through an engagement with the concepts of (a) social reproduction of gender and caste; (b) a rights-based approach embedded in the scheme and its link with distribution, and finally, (c) whether the age and grade-based classification of the scheme is attuned to realities of Indian classrooms.

(a) Social reproduction is defined by Mackintosh as “the process by which all the main relations in the society are constantly recreated and perpetuated” (1981, quoted in Elson, 2012, p. 63). Given that the school, as a public institution, is embedded in a specific environment and entails daily social interactions between peers and teachers, it reproduces hierarchies that already exist in that social context. Owing to the innate link between “purity,” caste, food, and given that MDMS entails preparing food and distributing it, several stories of discrimination have emerged in the years sincetheschemewas launched.Forinstance,in astudy byIndianInstituteofDalit Studies conducted across five states including Rajasthan in 2003, “37% report[ed] caste discrimination in MDMS and 48% report[ed] opposition to Dalit cooks” (Sahai, 2014, p. 8). In a study focusing specifically on the issue of access of Dalit children to MDMS in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, Thorat and Lee (2005) made several crucial observations:

“Where the mid-day meal is served in dominant caste localities, access for Dalit children is held hostage to the fluctuating state of caste relations in the village or region…Dominant caste community members intervene to block the hiring of Dalit cooks, favouring dominant caste cooks instead. Where a Dalit cook has been hired, dominant caste parents then begin sending their children to school with lunches packed at home, or require their children to come home for lunch, inanycase forbiddingtheirchildrentoeat foodpreparedbythe Dalit cook” (Thorat andLee,2005, p. 4199).

In addition to the role of caste in determining MDMS cooks, Sathiamma (2017) argues, “womenwelfareworkersbothinprimaryeducationandinprimaryhealthcare[inIndia]areexamples of the state’s welfare politics contributing to or perpetuating the sexual/gender division of labour” (Sathiamma, 2017, p. 39). To explain further, women taking on the role of cooks in the scheme, though renumerated, extends their domestication from private to the public sphere and reinforces gendered assumptions of women’s work. This has further led to rendering women’s work invisible and been used as an excuse by the State to underpay MDMS cooks. “In eight states and three Union Territories, [their] monthly pay remains frozen at Rs 1.000 [$13,50] since 2009, despite many Parliamentary committees over the years recommending a hike” (Barman, 2021).

(b) With the NFSA, 2013 converting benefits under legislations under its ambit (including MDMS) into legal entitlements, provisions under MDMS technically can be challenged in court in cases of non- implementation. However, Drèze (2004, p. 1726) argues,

“[While] the right to food [can be interpreted as] an entitlement to be free from hunger, which derives from the assertion that the society has enough resources, both economic and institutional, to ensure that everyone is adequately nourished, difficulties arise as soon as we try to flesh out this broad definition and translate it into specific entitlements and responsibilities.”

Given the reality of structural inequalities reproduced through the scheme, Ferguson’s (2015) critique of rights-based discourse is useful to understand why entitlements under MDMS are hard to realise. In the context of existing constitutional rights, but inadequate social and economic access, he gives an example of a man who did not want the constitutionally guaranteed “right to a house” but rather, the house itself. Further, while analysing the causes of persistent deprivation, Ferguson (2015) argues that individuals are now

“cut out of a distributive deal that used to include them. In such a view, getting cut back into the distributive deal is not treating the ‘symptom’ but goes, in fact, to the very root of the matter: the lack of any distributive entitlement is the underlying cause” (Ferguson, 2015, p. 38).

Linking this argument backto MDMS,it becomesclearthattheschemereproduces structural inequalities on lines of caste and gender and does little to challenge the unequal distribution of food in India.

“One common finding encountered by researchers studying the shaping of social policy in India is that the social structure ensures that benefits of social development are distributed according to inequality of status, i.e., those who are in relatively higher status get the maximum benefit of social development” (Garg and Mandal, 2013).

Table 2. Trends Over Time Multigrade Classes 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018.

Source: State Report Card: Rajasthan in Annual Status of Education Report, 2018

As a result, while MDMS “has led to a substantial increase in the enrolment of children in primary schools” (Khera, 2006, p. 4745) and been an important safety net for children against

hunger, “there [continues to] exist a marked widening of the gap, for instance, in educational and nutritional development among various social groups” (Garg and Mandal, 2013).

(c) As explained in Section I, MDMS is implemented for students in Standards 1-8 and the Central government guidelines stipulate two separate sets of caloric requirements per meal for students in primary and upper-primary classes. The latter is prescribed a higher caloric requirement. The assumption at the root of this differentiated specification is that children are assumed to be a particular age in a given class and that children at different age groups have varying nutritional requirements. For instance, it is assumed that a child in Standard 1 is age 6 and has a different and slightly lower caloric requirement from a child presumed to be age 14 in Standard 8. However, the assumptions here do not stand scrutiny to the reality of classrooms in India and the way that they are organised. To explain this further, the assumption of “monograde” classrooms i.e., that children of one age group attend a particular class has been repeatedly shown to be disrupted by classroom settings where children of multiple age groups sit together. The Table below describes the reality of multigradeclassrooms in Rajasthanandshowsthat farfrombeing an aberration,childrenofdifferent age groups have over a period of time routinely been sitting with one or more other classes. Hence, specifying caloric requirements according to the class a child is enrolled in does not necessarily cater to their actual nutritional needs. In this context, moving away from the age and category-centred classification in MDMS towards a relational or person-centred approach is much more fruitful. White (2002) argues that a key implication for this shift in approach would be to acknowledge “age [as]… essentially transformative” (White, 2002, p. 1102). Further, Kazak (2009) argues that the idea of chronological age at the heart of age-based classification negates social constructions of childhood youth. Kazak’s contribution is to put forward the idea of ‘social age’ as a supplementary perspective to chronological age in response to this trend. She highlights that chronological ageitselfis socially constructedand that“social age canbe analyticallyandpractically distinguished from biological development in a way similar to the distinction between gender and sex” (Kazak, 2009, p. 1310). Further, using social age mainstreaming can help development actors better understand contextual challenges.

Conclusion

Shamefully, even in the 21st century, the spectre of classroom hunger haunts India. While various studies have illustrated the positive effects MDMS has had on school enrolment, attendance and nutritional indicators, the essay attempts to critically evaluate the dimension of social equity and probe the various ways in which inequalities are reproduced through the scheme. As long as structural discrimination on lines of caste, gender, and identity mediate access to food, the potential of MDMS to eradicate hunger for all children will be lost. Finally, for MDMS to truly serve as a safety net in increasingly precarious times, equitable distribution of food must be treated as an urgent priority.

References

Akshaya, P. (2017). ‘Our Reach.’ Available at: https://rajasthan.akshayapatra.org/ourreach (Accessed: 7 January 2022).

Barman, S. (2021). ‘Most Mid-Day Meal Cooks Paid Under Rs 2k/Month.’ Indian Express, 20 December. Available at: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/most-mid-day-meal-cooks-pay7680906/. (Accessed: 9 January 2022).

CSRBox. (no date) ‘CSR Project by: Havells India Limited.’ Available: https://csrbox.org/India_CSR_Project_Havells-India-Limited-Mid-Day-Meal-%20MDMprogramme-%20Rajasthan-_18337 (Accessed: 7 January 2022)

Department of Food & Public Distribution, Government of India (no date) ‘National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013’ Available: https://nfsa.gov.in/portal/NFSA-Act#. (Accessed: 10 January 2022).

Drèze, J. (2004). ‘Democracy And Right To Food.’ Economic And Political Weekly, 39(17), pp. 17231731.

Drèze, J. (2003). ‘Future Of Mid-Day Meals.’ Economic And Political Weekly. 38(44), pp. 4673-4683. Drèze, J. Sen, A. K. (1991) Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Oxford University. Available: https://oxford-universitypressscholarshipcom.eur.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/0198283652.001.0001/acprof-9780198283652. (Accessed: 19 December 2022).

Elson, D. (2012)Social Reproduction inThe Global Crisis: Rapid Recovery OrLong-Lasting Depletion? In Utting, P., Razavi, S., Varghese Bucholz, R.(eds), The Global Crisis and Transformative Social Change. pp. 63-80. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Ferguson, J. (2015). Give A Man A Fish: From Patriarchal Productionism to The Revalorization Of Distribution. In Give A Man A Fish: Reflections on The New Politics of Distribution, pp. 35-62. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University.

Garg, M. (2013). ‘Mid-Day Meal for The Poor, Privatised Education for The Non-Poor.’ Economic and Political Weekly. 48(30), pp. 155-163.

Global Hunger Index. (2021) Global Hunger Index 2021. Available: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/ranking.html. (Accessed: 7 January 2022).

Havells India Limited. (2019). ‘Havells Mid-Day Meal Program.’ Available: https://havells.com/en/discover-havells/csr/healthnutrition.html. (Accessed 7 January 2022).

Kazak, C. and Rose, C. (2009). ‘Towards A Working Definition and Application of Social Age In International Development Studies.’ Journal of Development Studies, 45(8), pp. 1307-1324

Khera, R. (2006). ‘Mid-Day Meals in Primary Schools: Achievements and Challenges.’ Economic and Political Weekly. 41(46), pp. 4742-4750.

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (no date) ‘About The PM Poshan Scheme.’ Available: http://www.mdm.nic.in/mdm_website/. (Accessed: 10 January 2022).

Pandey, S. and Kapur, A. (2020) ‘Mid-Day Meal Scheme, Gol, 2020-21.’ Budget Briefs, 12(12), pp. 1-12. Delhi: Accountability Initiative, Centre for Policy Research.

Prasanna, P. (2021). ‘Bringing Politics in Providing Eggs with Midday Meals in Karnataka Is Dangerous.’ The News Minute, December 17. Available: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/bringing-politics-providing-eggs-midday-mealskarnataka-dangerous-158850 (Accessed: 9 January 2022)

Pratham Education Foundation. (2018). State Report Card: Rajasthan in Annual Status of Education Report, 2018. Available: http://img.asercentre.org/docs/ASER%202018/Release%20Material/English%20files/rajasthan.pdf (Accessed: 7 January 2022).

Sahai, C.S. (2014). ‘Mid-Day Meal Scheme: Achievements and Challenges.’ International Journal of Humanities And Social Science Invention 3(10), pp. 6-9.

Seth, P. and Jain, P. (2021) ‘What NFHS-5 Tells Us About the Status Of Child Nutrition In India.’ The Wire. 26 November. Available at: https://thewire.in/health/nfhs-5-data-child-nutrition-india. (Accessed: 12 January 2022).

Singh, A. (2014). ‘School Meals As a Safety Net: An Evaluation Of The Midday Meal Scheme In India.’ Economic Development and Cultural Change 62(2), pp. 275-306

Sathiamma, S. (2017) State Without Honour Women Workers in India's Anganwadis. Oxford: Oxford University.

Thorat, S. and Lee. (2005). ‘Caste Discrimination and Food Security Programmes.’ Economic and Political Weekly. 40(39), pp. 4198-4201.

White, S. (2002) ‘Being, Becoming and Relationship: Conceptual Challenges of a Child Rights Approach In Development.’ Journal Of International Development November. 14(8), pp. 10951104.

The Connection Between Poverty Concepts and Poverty Reduction Strategies: The Case of China

By Lai Junhao, China Introduction

Poverty is an obvious but elusive concept. In many cases, one can easily tell if a family is stuck in poverty. However, how conceptualising different types of poverty has always been a controversial issue in academic circles. More critically, different perceptions of poverty may directly influence the design of poverty reduction policies, potentially affecting the livelihoods and lives of thousands of people. In this essay, the author will analyse how different conceptions of poverty biased towards different poverty reduction strategies from the perspectives of China. To clarify my view, three concepts of poverty are introduced. The first one is related to production as poverty is a material shortage caused by low productivity. We discuss how this biased concept leads to oversimplified strategies that only focus on production. Then we discuss the capability approach which leads to human capital related strategies and essentially emphasises the importance of distribution in poverty alleviation strategies. In the last part, we compare the social exclusion approach with the above two concepts and point out the difficulties and opportunities for its accurate application in poverty alleviation strategies.

Part I

“It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” Deng Xiaopin3 Deng Xiaoping's famous "cat theory" used a cat-and-mouse metaphor to explain the most fundamental reason for China's reform and opening up - raising productivity to alleviate poverty. Deng believed that the root cause of poverty in a region was material deprivation caused by inadequatelocal productivity.Inother words, this concept “frames poverty as deficient productivity” (Fischer, 2018, p. 190). The “productivity” here, specifically, refers to the output of every individual or the value-added they create. It is better described as “monetary value-added productivity” because it could be only measured by the money-metric approach in reality (Fischer, 2018, p. 189). Gross National Product (GDP) is usually the most important measure of productivity although its importance has waned amid much criticism. Some scholars believe that the change in individual income can be used to refer to the change in individual labour productivity, but this may be a tautology (Fischer, 2018). Even if productivity improvements do lead to higher personal incomes, they do not immediately translate into better living conditions (Pantazis, 2006). Above all, this concept of poverty focuses on the importance of growth in eradicating poverty, which by it is considered to be a lack of material and changes in poverty are observed through different moneymetric measures.

This view is often criticised as an obsession with economic growth (Fischer, 2018), but it is not meaningless. On the contrary, changes in productivity do affect poverty. Productivity often sets a ceiling on income or wages. That is why proponents of this view always say, ‘let's make the pie

3 The translation of this Chinese sentence is taken from China Daily (Buckle, 2018). Available at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201808/02/WS5b728ae4a310add14f385b4a.html

bigger’. For example, research showed a strong correlation between agricultural output per unit area and declines in poverty indicators, and it is “unlikely that there are many other development interventions capable of reducing the numbers in poverty so effectively” (Irz, Lin, Thirtle, Wiggins, 2001, p. 449). This research points out “a yield increase of one third might reduce the numbers in poverty by a quarter or more” (Irz et al., 2001, p. 462). A recent study supports this view but also points out that the effect of productivity on poverty reduction is small in industry and services, and that the effect of increased agricultural productivity on poverty reduction decreases as the former increases (Ivanic and Martin, 2018). In conclusion, productivity improvement may have a positive effect on poverty reduction regardless of the measurement problem. However, it is not a panacea and the effect will not last forever.

This concept of production plays an important role in the action of alleviating poverty because it fits the intuitive imagination of many people, especially the people from the upper class. When they analyse their relative success, they often think that the successful people (or regions) have created a huge amount of value. In turn, it is normal for them to think that poverty is caused by a lack of productivity in underdeveloped areas. Thus, until now, increasing productivity has been at the centre of many poverty-reduction programmes. As noted above, focusing on productivity growth alone creates problems in poverty reduction action. I will start with the measurement issue and discuss how the fallacy of productivity reduction and the neglect of risk affect actual poverty reduction programmes.

The trouble with measurement of productivity is that “they are generally based on monetary value-added measures, not actual output” (Fischer, 2018, p. 192). When we use value-added data to measure productivity, we measure “a combination of output and price” (Fischer, 2018, p.192), the latter includes the value of the wage. Moreover, in services or industries with no physical output. This measure tends to look at changes in the price of labour power as a commodity in the market rather than changes in productivity. For example, a Chinese TV star was recently prosecuted by the government for tax evasion involving more than 100 million yuan, which means he may earn more than 150 million yuan before tax in a year (Tian, 2022). His high earnings, and those of his peers, may not be well explained by rising labour productivity, considering the low income of actors 30 years ago in China4. Even in the industry which has physical output, this measurement is still problematic. China's blue-collar workers are considered to be among the world's most productive although their wages are still third-world standards and far below those of their American counterparts.

The immediate reason for this is that labour power as a commodity cannot move freely in reality. In other words, workers from the Global South cannot simply move to the Global North to do the same jobs. They face at least two barriers including language skills and nationality (or legal). The latter is essentially a barrier to power, the exclusion of immigrant groups by groups with a stronger voice at the local level reflected in law. As a result, workers and farmers in the Global South are unlikely to vote with their feet, and their labour power as a commodity is actually in oversupply locally. From the perspective of the labour theory of value, it is difficult for these workers to obtain fair wages for themselves by improving their productivity because most of their surplus-value benefits the north of the country through the value chain. That is to say, in the Global South, Marx’s conclusion still works: “The cost of production of simple labour power, therefore, amounts to the cost of existence and reproduction of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and reproduction constitutes wages” (Marx, 1884, p.84). In other words, the increased productivity of workers in such

4 For example, a famous Chinese actor was only paid 2,000 yuan for a long-running soap opera in 1986 (Luju Bar, 2022) Available at: https://lujuba.cc/en/649578.html

places does not necessarily lead to higher incomes or better well-being. On the contrary, the more productive they become, the greater the oversupply of labour power in a given area, and the lower the wages. In conclusion, we may be measuring price and wage or the relationship of supply and demand when we measure productivity. If we believe that “monetary valuation can be used as an accurateapproximationofproductivityinacomplexmoderneconomy”,we mayfallintothe“fallacy of productivity reductionism” (Fischer, 2018, p. 192).

In addition to this fallacy, the risks involved in improving productivity are often overlooked. The transition from farmer to waged worker is often seen as a good way to reduce poverty. For example, a central government official in China stated that "the fastest way to reduce poverty is for poor people to work outside the hometown" (Gu, 2020). Although an immigrant working in a factory is more productive, he or she faces an unfamiliar social environment and a more dangerous working environment. These risks may even be ignored by this individual. In a report from Love Save Pneumoconiosis, more than half of pneumoconiosis workers prefer to work in a high-dust environment because the income is relatively higher and they are not get sick immediately. Therefore, the risk of disease that has left them now economically poor is ignored (Love Save Pneumoconiosis, 2020). This ignorance of risk is also a huge problem with productivity-focused strategies.

Under the influence of the focus on productivity, many poverty reduction programmes also try their best to "upgrade" the structure of agriculture, that is, the "upgrading" of subsistence agriculture to profitable commercial agriculture. In China, a common method used by local governments to reduce poverty is to instruct farmers to grow less food but "higher value-added" goods instead. This method did help some rural residents out of poverty, but it had unintended side effects. We can understand this from an oral history report of a street-level official in Yunnan as an example. In Yunnan, a mountainous province in China, various types of crops can be easily consumed in provincial markets because arable land is limited. However, with the intervention of local governments, farmers supported by microloans began to grow higher-value crops which tended to be homogeneous because the geographical and climatic conditions in the same area were similar. These crops are usually sold to coastal cities where the economy is better, bringing the farmers the expected profits (Ma and Lou, 2020). However, when most farmers began to produce this kind of high value-added crops, the oversupply followed. Most farmers had economic losses and the poverty of some farmers deepened (Ma and Lou, 2020). It can be described as a process that an excessive focus on supply-side accumulation leads to “lots of infrastructure or employment but with low rates of utilisation or value” (Fischer, 2018, p. 200). What is more, it is not difficult to think of another reason why these farmers suffer economically. They do not have capital security, ability to withstand the huge fluctuations in the price of their products in the market, and bargaining power. Therefore, the expansion of their production results in the higher risk. From this example, we can see the negative consequences of focusing only on productivity in poverty reduction practices. Whether an individual (or household) moves from subsistence to market-based commercial agriculture or becomes a worker, their productivity is likely to increase. However, their incomes (or wages) are squeezed in the distribution process preventing them from sharing in the fruits of growth consistently.

As a strong supplement to this strategy, which focuses on increasing productivity, “reinforcing subsistence capacity can serve as an important wealth-supporting strategy” in the process of marketising (Fischer, 2018, p. 100). Productivity has a big role does not mean that the centre of gravity of the poverty reduction strategy is productivity because the well-being of the people is not just personal productivity. Moreover, the so-called "productivity improvement" does not necessarily reflect their income but let them suffer a higher hidden risk.

“A book does hold a house of gold; a book does hide a charming bride.” Emperor Zhenzong (Zhao Heng, n.d.) 5

This section begins with this slightly vulgar quote because it is a popular quote that has been used to emphasise the importance of being successful in the formal educational system in China ever since (ironically, it is from an emperor) and encapsulates many people's perception of the importance of human capital enhancement in poverty reduction strategies. Poverty, these people argued, is not a lack of productivity or income but rather “a failure to achieve certain minimum capabilities” (Sen, 1985, p. 669), or “a failure to convert functionings into capability” (Fischer, 2018, p. 128). “The conversion of real incomes into actual capabilities varies with social circumstances and personal features” (Sen, 1985, p. 670), so we need to realise there is a distinction between a matter of productivity (or income) and a matter of achieving minimum capacity (Sen, 1985). During the Han Dynasty in China, for example, even wealthy merchants could not legally live a luxurious life (such as wearing clothes made of silk) while scholars who passed examinations to become officials were not restricted (Zhang, 2013). Here, the merchants have “endowments”/functioning (wealth), but they face ‘failure of exchange entitlements’ (Rangasami, 1985) leading to their relatively lower standard of living.

In contrast to the first concept of poverty in this article, the capability perspective focuses more on the demand side than the supply side, i.e. productivity growth. Therefore, poverty measurement and poverty intervention policies under the guidance of this perspective also tend to examine if individuals achieve certain minimum capabilities. Despite Sen's objections (Sen, 1985), "universal" “multi-dimensional” standards were devised, and one of them was the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). It applies the measure across three dimensions: health, education, and standard of living (Alkire and Santos, 2014). It seems to measure capability but essentially measure functioning, which does not automatically represent the potential of capability (Fischer, 2018). For example, education indicators in the MPI include "years of schooling" and "school attendance" (Alkire and Santos, 2014). The implication assumes that the higher years of schooling, the higher opportunity to be successful from getting high rewarding work. But we know that this may not be the case or even the opposite. More students in a school often mean less rooms for individuals to receive personalised education, let alone the stratification in the education system. It is simpler to measure functioning and assume that it will translate into capability. However, it is also more biased which can mislead the practice of poverty alleviation actions. On this measure, well-run local authorities are likely to funnel as many school-age children as possible into an education system that operates based on the number of pupils in the previous stage. At present, education systems (often on the margins of the budget system) are suddenly under increased budgetary pressure, and they may not be able to provide the educational services as expected. As a result, the quality of services would be inevitably deteriorated, unless the support for this social provisioning was significantly increased. Moreover, even if a poverty reduction programmeme could guarantee the transformation of individuals from "functioning" to "capability" over the lifetime of the project, it could not guarantee the sustainability of such success. China is a case in point. As mentioned in the quotation at the beginning of this section, success in the education system has long been considered a good way out

5 These two selected sentences are from Encouraging Learning, a poem written by Emperor Zhenzong.

of poverty in China (Sier, 2021). However, this kind of success is limited and can only be achieved through serious competition. Many poverty-alleviation programmemes, including some experimental ones, aim to help poor children to get better education and a good job. However, with the economic downturn in recent years, the demand for labour has been greatly reduced which has led only top students in the educational system to get decent jobs, resulting in excessive competition and common anxiety (R. Li, 2021). In recent years, young Chinese have begun to reflect on the necessity of such fierce competition and have adjusted the meaning of the word "Involution" to denote a denial of the unnecessary promotion of human capital (C. Li, 2021). As Ferguson said, “in these times having training or education is no guarantee of a job and having a job no guarantee of a decent living” (Ferguson, 2015).

Similar to the dilemma described in the previous paragraphs, even though many poverty reduction projects are rightly focused on the path of turning functioning into capability, they sometimes experience a disheartening complexity of reality. The liberalism of Sen’s capability approach partly causes this dilemma, namely “conflicting of freedom” (Fischer, 2018, p. 135-6). These projects have greatly improved the human capital situation in developing countries Local people have managed to lift themselves out of poverty by working in the global North or in their own cities. In other words, the brain drain problem causes the areas with scarce human capital lose highly skilled workers more while the areas with abundant human capital gain more high-quality talents, aggravating the inequality between regions and even countries (Docquier and Rapoport, 2012). This is not only the case in China but also other countries. For example, health workers studying medicine in Malawi, working in the UK, earning more and achieving personal development, are examples of poverty improvement from the perspective of capability (Fischer, 2018). Malawi has not only lost talents but also spent money on them, the equivalent of a developing country subsidising a developed one (Britain). Such personal choices may be often condemned by nationalists. It is also unreasonable since the so-called "human capital" (functioning) must be in the "economic and political centre of gravity" to turn into the best effect (capability). In other words, in the practice of poverty reduction, the focus on individual capabilities and their free realisation implies the effect of directing the most capable individuals in marginal areas to the "central areas", leading to greater regional inequality.

Many scholars have suggested that remittances might mitigate or even eliminate the brain drain. It remains debatable whether remittances, especially from skilled migrants (who tend to earn higher wages), offset their loss as a talent stream. The report by academics at the World Bank shows that migrants with higher education levels send more remittances using micro data from 11 main destination countries which is enough to address concerns about brain drain (Niimi, Ozden and Schiff, 2008). Another research, published around the same time, found that remittances in Ecuador helped to keep children in education during a shock (Calero, Bedi and Sparrow, 2009). However, after considering the endogeneity of remittances and education levels, studies show that migrants with higher skills (education level) send fewer remittances. Moreover, the negative effects of brain drain are not mitigated, let alone offset, by remittances. In other words, an intervention that succeeds in reducing poverty from a capability approach also tends to push the region deeper into poverty. These dilemmas are even more pronounced in East Asia. In East Asia, welfare systems are heavily dependent on the domestic sector, where the young are expected to have a responsibility to take care of the elderly (Croll, 2006). In effect, the intergenerational contract gives governments room to reduce welfare provision while preserving the basic rights of the disadvantaged (Croll, 2006). The Brain Drain in the fringe areas, however, is upsetting this delicate balance. For example, the research in China has found that older people in rural areas are more likely to commit suicide than older people in urban areas, and their suicidal impulses may be due to financial deprivation and

mental loneliness, or depression (Li, Xu and Chi, 2016). This may reflect the fact that while some people (usually the young and healthy) have succeeded in moving out of poverty according to Sen's theory of capability, others who are more vulnerable (usually the older and less healthy) have fallen deeper into poverty.

In conclusion, the capability approach can offer scholars and workers a standard beyond the money-metric approach to analyse various types of poverty. However, it could lead to a more serious inequality problem among regions, since it is “unable to deal with systems, structure, and inequality” (Fischer, 2018, p. 139).

Part III

“A thousand miles from home, I’m grieved at autumn’s plight; ill now and then for years, alone I’m on this height.” Du Fu, On the Height6

The author of the above verse has lost contact with his family and suffered from illness after a war. He was just an immigrant experiencing social exclusion although he had been a government official. It is hard to argue that social exclusion is a kind of poverty, for even one of the greatest poets in China was also an excludee. Therefore, social exclusion tends to answer the question "why poverty" rather than "what is poverty", compared with the approaches discussed in the above two parts. It describes “various contextualised social causes and/or social consequences of poverty” and “bring in subtler sociological analyses into the existing field of poverty studies” (Fischer, 2018, p. 142143). The social exclusion perspective focuses on social relations rather than the productivity perspective discussed in Part I. It also emphasises on the dynamic process that causes poverty rather than the results of poverty, which is a supplement to the capability perspective discussed in Part II. It is worth noting that the concept of social exclusion originated in Europe and was originally used to describe the failure of the welfare systems of European welfare states to cover the unemployed people. This concept equates social exclusion with the failure of inclusion in the formal labourmarket or formal welfaresystem. Ifit was not modified,it wouldbemeaningless in theGlobal South where large numbers of people in many countries are unemployed or in insecure employment (more than 90%), while the proportion is probably less than 20% in countries in the Global North (Fischer, 2018). On the other hand, welfare provision in these countries may be incompletely (and sometimes not at all) dependent on formal welfare systems, such as the Intergenerational contract in East Asia (Croll, 2006). Therefore, the follow-up development of this concept is necessary. It is defined in terms of “the social aspects of deprivation”, concerning how isolation cause or reinforce relative poverty.

However, the “strong degrees of ambiguity” of this concept makes related strategies biased (Fischer, 2018, p. 152). First, social exclusion is often seen as a static state when this concept is put into practice (Fischer, 2018). Then it will be similar to the capability approach. Closely related to the first point, the relationship between social exclusion and poverty is also problematic (Pantazis, 2006, p. 8). If social exclusion does not lead to poverty, it is not noteworthy. This means what we are really concerned about is the overlap between social exclusion and poverty (Fischer, 2018, p. 162). A focus on social exclusion potentially becomes a focus on multi-dimensional poverty in a macro poverty reduction programmeme rather than “the questions of social membership” (Pantazis, 2006). However, how to define "relational" and "relationality" is still inconsistent (Fischer, 2018). If

6 This is a sentence from a Chinese famous poem, the translator for Xu Yuanchong. Available at: https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-300826-559691.html (partly in Chinese)

the rejection is an intentional behaviour between individuals, it no doubt ignores the structural problems such as the school district policy of China and the hukou system where which immigrants in the big cities cannot enjoy the same educational resources as the urban residents. It is essentially a kind of structural social exclusion that is not completely caused by discrimination between groups. Moreover, the exclusion can be occured across the economic spectrum, not limited to the poor. The historical rejection of the rich in China, described in part II, is another example. The above conceptual ambiguity makes it difficult for poverty reduction strategies themselves to have a clear direction. Similar to the limitations of the capability approach in the application of poverty reduction strategies, they can only intervene for "functioning" (Fischer, 2018). For example, poverty alleviation relocation in China is designed to “include” most of residents in the remoted area (especiallyin terms of publicwelfareprovisioningalthoughtheresearchshowsthatit can potentially lead to deeper social exclusion with the influence of place attachment, especially for the immigrants in urban areas since their livelihood modes are drastically changed (Zhu, Jia and Zhou, 2021).

However, social exclusion approach has its unique advantages in micro social work because it can help front-line social workers deeply analyse the life history of the client's unfortunate experience. It encourages front-line social workers to pay more attention to the complex history and dynamics ofpovertyratherthanmakingsuperficial judgments aboutitsconsequences. Insocialwork theory, the “Person-in-environment” perspective have well resonance with the social exclusion approach, “connecting everyday life directly to larger social structures in a dynamic way” (Kondrat, 2002). In other words, as a bridge from micro to macro, it is reasonable and helpful to apply the social exclusion approach in poverty reduction strategies. For example, the social workers in a social work programme in Guangdong, China, simultaneously practice three strategies after a life history study: "community organisation construction", "encourage excludes into community organisations" and "include the excludes in the corresponding social welfare system" (Zhang and Liao, 2021, p. 8493). These three strategies make a poor family successfully convert functioning into capability with the support of the community. This change is expected to be sustainable because the family is integrated into the community (the female head of this family was elected to be vice-captain of a women’s mutual-help group) where residences are grouped together. In this example, social workers change the trend of poverty through two kinds of integration. The first is the integration between the residents of the community, and another is the integration of excluded families and community activists. Through these two kinds of integration, social relations are rebuilt, and individuals and families could be supported against the possibility of falling into poverty when they are affected by shocks. The ambiguity of social exclusion may be a problem in macro poverty reduction strategies (such as poverty measurement programmes based on quantitative statistics techniques). However, it canbeanadvantageinmicrosocialworkpovertyreductionstrategiesbecauseitmaximisescreativity and sociological imagination of social workers regarding to their interventions.

Conclusion

In this essay, three approaches to conceptualising poverty and how they have influenced the practice of poverty reduction strategies and programmes were introduced. The fallacy of productivity reductionism may produce unpredictable consequences as it ignores the importance of fair distribution. In reality, the concern on capability might turn into the improvement of functioning and assume that it could be automatically converted into capability. The concept of social exclusion brings society into poverty analysis, but its ambiguity is still a problem when we apply this concept to poverty alleviation strategies. These concepts remind me of what we learned from another class, somethinking aroundpragmatist complexity(Ansell andGeyer,2017)and wickedproblems (Alford

and Head, 2017). In my opinion, the concept of poverty is a wicked problem with complexity. In other words, the problem of poverty, which itself does not take a single characteristic and cause, cannot be eliminated linearly. Since poverty is not a single economic, political, or sociological issue, poverty reduction strategies must be designed with an interdisciplinary mindset and a humble mind basedondeeplocalfieldresearch.Furthermore,weshouldconsiderwhetherthestrategyisreversible when wedesign it orwhetherthereis roomforremedywhen wefindaproblem. Inthis way,povertyreduction workers may be more confident that the strategies have some degree of positive effects without causing irreversible negative consequences.

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Peace in the Middle East as Represented by Times Magazine

By Mira Zaghbour, Lebanon

Figure 1. TIME Cover Magazine, July 2006.

Introduction

A lone figure, seemingly that of a man, struggles to walk through the rubble of the destroyed city surrounding him. Shot from behind, the man is walking away from the viewers, heading towards more rubble and destroyed buildings. The city is Beirut, shot during the 2006 war with Israel on July 20th of that year. The retreating figure of that man, placed right in the middle of the frame, was put on thecoverofTIME magazinewith thetitle,in bold uppercaseletters, “THEWAYOUT”,followed by “… OF THIS MESS. THE SIX KEYS TO PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST” (DworzakMagnum, 2006). The war with Israel was raging in full force at the time of the shot. I remember distinctly the feeling of dread I got as a child when I saw dust covered mutilated corpses – many of them children like me – shown on TV as they were dug up from underneath their bombed homes. Back then, I could not understand why the Israeli army was bombing people in their homes and what could possibly justify such actions. The war between Israel and Hezbollah (who had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers at the border and triggered the war) went on from 12 July - 14 August 2006. The United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spearheaded diplomatic efforts with the aim to create a “New Middle East” out of the ashes of the war, fuelled by the Bush administration (Chaitou and Ghandour, 2008). By focusing on the usage of visual elements in the cover as well as textual categorisation and framing methods. I will examine the means by which the TIME cover and its

associated cover story contributed to justifying the brutality of the Israeli invasion and Israel’s murder of the Lebanese population.

Visual analysis of the TIME cover

The depiction of Arab bodies as bodies that are used to conflict, bloodshed and destruction is a common narrative that contributes to their dehumanisation. It also helps outside onlookers feel more comfortable when seeing their pain, since they’re supposedly accustomed to it. The TIME cover depicts a man walking through the rubble of a destroyed Beirut, but we can only see his back. We’re unable to look at his face and assess his facial expression. There is no address from the man towards the viewers: this image is an offer (Kress and Leeuwen, 2005). Offers tend to depict those in it as if they were “specimens in a display case” being observed from afar, sometimes without their knowledge, or consent, which is the case in the TIME cover (Kress and Leeuwen, 2005, p. 367).

TIME offers the image of a man lost in the rubble. We are invited to look at him as if he were living in another world where conflict ruled, compared to a world whose viewers could buy a magazine and look at a war happening somewhere far away to people who are ‘used’ to it. TIME positions these individuals as if destroyed cities were their natural habitat. This offer is situated within geopolitical power relations between the West and the Middle East– or more broadly, between what is considered ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ in which viewers in the West can comfortably witness such scenes of destruction and move on with their day.

TIME further solidifies this barrier by creating distance between the photographer and the man through a “very long shot” (Kress and Leeuwen, 2005, p.369). This makes it impossible for the viewer to perceive any details about the man that might get them to identify with him. This further reinforces the notion that this conflict is ‘far away’ from the West, something that happens ‘over there’ in the Arab world and not ‘over here’, in Europe or the United States for instance. Finally, being pictured from behind highlights the vulnerability of the man and crystallises the power relations between viewers/photographer and the photographed. He is probably unaware that he is being photographed and has no say in the matter, erasing thus his identity and agency from how he is represented in a magazine cover that will be seen by millions. The vanishing point towards which he is walking to (shown by the yellow arrows in Fig.1) could indicate his refusal to acknowledge “The Way Out” proposed by the Americans, with the title placed behind him. The cover therefore arguably sets the scene for the justification for U.S. intervention by depicting the Lebanese Arab man as a vulnerable victim refusing aid while remaining comfortable in his destroyed environment.

Categorisation: righteous West vs. terrorist Arabs

The accompanying cover story, written by former TIME editor Michael Elliott, outlines the six keys necessary to establishing peace in the Middle East, all of which are steeped in U.S. interventionism (Elliott, 2006). There is a common thread running throughout this article that aims not only to depict the Middle East as a region in need of saving, but also as one deserving of ‘punishment’ for provoking Israel. Using the lens of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), one can see how membership categories of ‘us’ vs ‘them’ are formed with the use of certain terminologies and labels, providing fertile ground for the normalisation and justification of violence against the innocent in Lebanon (Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil, 2004).

U.S. and Israeli actors are positioned as the subjects of the story with which readers are supposed to identify with since many of them are named directly, and thus humanised: for instance, ‘Prime Minister Olmert’ (of Israel) and ‘Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’ are written with their

titles to give them authoritative importance, whereas ‘Bush’ and ‘the President’ are written separately, perhaps to evoke a sense of familiarity and closeness with Americans (Elliott, 2006). Allied political figures are called in to solidify the legitimacy of U.S. interventionism and the Israeli assault, starting with a “French official involved in counterterrorism” (Elliott, 2006). This official argues that Israel is entitled to react this way when provoked in such a manner by Hizballah (Elliott, 2006). Arab figures, such as “the Saudis” – with the naming invoking familiarity once again – “King Abdullah II of Jordan” and “President Homsi Mubarak of Egypt” are brought up to add regional legitimacy to the Israeli attack by quoting their condemnation of Hezbollah's actions and the necessity for the latter to bear responsibility for their actions (Elliott, 2006). Furthermore, affective categorisation is used when speaking of Israelis to invoke sympathy for their cause with terms such as “its people will be safe”, “to convince Israelis that they and their children can sleep easy at night” (Elliott, 2006). Adding to that, the Israeli army is portrayed as one inspiring respect with terms such as “The Jewish state’s superb armed forces” (Elliott, 2006).

Turning to the ‘other’ side, Hizbollah and Hamas are described as one would expect: “suicide bombers,” “cells of well-trained militias energised by religious fervour,” “guerrillas,” and “today’s irregular foes” (Elliott, 2006). They are also accused of using civilians as shields with terms such as “live in villages, hide in houses and are sheltered by civilians (or force civilians to shelter them)” (Elliott, 2006).The relationshipbetween the ‘us’ category (theU.S., Israel, andallies) and the‘them’ category (Hezbollah and Hamas) is one that portrays the latter as having forcibly dragged the former into conflict, which left the ‘protagonists’ with no choice but to retaliate with full force. Indeed, passive language such as “Israel has to fight a war”, “Israel finds itself in a dilemma” seems to allude to Israel’s supposed reluctance to engage in a war (Elliott, 2006). Therefore, it is clear how, with the abundance of actors in support of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, the protagonists of the story, the Israelis, are set up to be righteous and backed by legitimate forces, both western and Arab, while the ‘others’, the enemies, are reduced to Hezbollah and Hamas, with no mention of other actors (such as the government, civil society groups, civilians) who are deserving of punishment for their provocation. This membership categorisation clearly serves the author’s purpose of justifying the Israeli assault upon civilians as one that is necessary in reaction to Hezbollah's terrorism.

Framing: modernity of the West and barbarity of the Arabs

Events such as war and violent conflict will inevitably be framed in particular ways that suit specific political and economic interests. The 2006 war in Lebanon is not immune to that. The categorisation set up by Elliott (2006) in which western actors and allies are grouped together in opposition to the terrorism of Hizbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinians allows for a framed storytelling of the 2006 war events that depicts the Israeli response to Hizbollah’s kidnapping as not just appropriate but deserved, and the “collateral damage” as a mere unfortunate consequence. As such, the first frame within this article that I will call ‘Blame and Justification’ is a direct result of the categorisation process developed by Elliott (2006). This frame is episodic in the sense that it describes certain events with “the use of negative stereotypes” (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2008). This framefocuses entirely on theinitial provocationbyHizbollah’skidnapping ofthetwo Israeli soldiers that triggered the war, the threat posed by Hamas on innocent Israelis and the threat that Iran’s backing of Hizbollahposes to Israel’s existence. It conveniently ignores the suffering enduredwithin Lebanon during the war, with 1,109 Lebanese people murdered, 4,399 people injured and 1 million displaced within a single month (Human Rights Watch, 2007). It serves to justify the brutality committed by Israelis against the people in Lebanon.

Moreover, a thematic frame is found within the text and the visual that I will call ‘Normalisation of Arab Conflict,’ which depicts the Middle East as a region in constant conflict that must be solved with external intervention, such as that of the U.S. Such thematic frames tend to provide political or social context for the event at hand (Schwalbe, 2006). The visual contributes to this framing with the selection of a part of Beirut that was completely destroyed, as opposed to other parts of it that remained functional. Furthermore, the article itself begins with painting a brutal picture of the Middle East, described as “drenched in blood and covered in the dust of bombedrubble” (Elliott, 2006). Elliott also emphasises the seemingly unending history of conflict in the Middle East with terms such as “Year after year, decade after decade” and “a small sliver of land in which ancient grievances are played out again and again” (Elliott, 2006). Finally, a more generic frame named ‘Modernity’ envelops this article. It portrays the U.S. as “the policeman to which those in any tough neighbourhood eventually turn”, who gets dragged into the region as the saviour for its woes, “whether it wants to be or not” (Elliott, 2006). The portrayal of the West, specifically the U.S., as the saviour, is a pillar of modernity discourse that sees regions such as the Middle East as backwardsandincapableofsaving themselves.Assuch,westernpowersare neededto bringin peace and progress. This generic frame of ‘Modernity’ spans across time and space and can successfully convince both westerners and Arabs of the latter’s need for western intervention.

Conclusion

The coverage of wars does not come without its socio-political, military, and economic influences. Pieces of media that portray conflict are situated within these power relations and formulate specific realities for viewers who may view media differently depending on their social position. Such is the case for the coverage of the 2006 war of Lebanon in the TIME cover. The practice of categorisation, whether conscious or not by the author, provides a solid foundation for the justification of Israeli brutality upon the people in Lebanon through the development of episodic, thematic, and generic frames. Therefore, the justification of Israeli violence is contained within a framing of the Middle East as an area in constant conflict, all of which stems from a discourse of modernity.

References

Chaitou, K. and Ghandour, T. (2008). Lebanon is Not Two Camps Part 1. [online] Middle East Institute. Available at: https://www.mei.edu/publications/lebanon-not-two-camps-part-1 (Accessed: 27 June 2022).

Dworzak-Magnum, T. (2006). The Way Out of this Mess. The Six Keys to Peace in the Middle East. TIME Magazine. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060731,00.html.

Elliott, M. (2006). Six Keys to Peace. [online] TIME. Available at: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1218058,00.html (Accessed: 27 June 2022).

Human Rights Watch (2007). WhyTheyDied:CivilianCasualtiesinLebanonduringthe 2006War [online] Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2007/09/05/why-theydied/civilian-casualties-lebanon-during-2006-war.

Kress, G. and Leeuwen, T.V. (2005). Visual Interaction. In: The Discourse Reader. Routledge: pp. 362–384.

Leudar, I., Marsland, V. and Nekvapil, J. (2004). On Membership Categorization: ‘Us’, ‘Them’ and ‘Doing Violence’ in Political Discourse. Discourse & Society, 15(2-3), pp.243–266. doi: 10.1177/0957926504041019

Papacharissi, Z. and de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2008). News Frames Terrorism: A Comparative Analysis of Frames Employed in Terrorism Coverage in U.S. and U.K. Newspapers. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 13(1), pp.52–74. doi: 10.1177/1940161207312676.

Schwalbe, C.B. (2006). Remembering Our Shared Past: Visually Framing the Iraq War on U.S. News Websites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(1), pp.264–289. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00325.x.

WhenAdvocacy Perpetuates Systemic Violence:A Critique of National Movements Contesting the Criminalisation of Youth Access to Gender-Affirming Care

By Daniel Soucy, USA

Introduction

While marriage equality in the United States was presumed to bring a new age of sexual freedom and LGBTQ equality, numerous commentators point out how gender and sexuality are again becoming central in political, legal and moral debates (Brenan, 2021; Chappel, 2022; and Romano, 2022). In these debates, Conservative-Christian understandings of ‘sex-assigned-at- birth’ often position sex as a natural and biological fact. As such, an individual’s gender performativity (Butler, 2004) and sexual desires should correspond neatly with these biological realities. Furthermore, deviance from these ‘facts’ is framed as morally corrupt and threatening. While more progressive framings have identified gender as a social construction, even these continue to juxtapose gender against sex’s intrinsic character (Fausto-Sterling, 2000 and Fuentes, 2022). As a result, policies seek to regulate transgender people based on the justification that misguided understandings of biology corrupt their bodies and minds. Intersecting this view, Christian discourse often frames children as pure thus positioning transgender children as desperately needing protection from social corruption. These views have framed a variety of policies regulating bathroom use, education about LGBTQ identities, transgender participation in sports and gender-affirming care (Thoreson, 2022 and The Daily, 2022). While each of these issues is unique, they all centre around rhetorical, legal and political attempts to confine children to heteronormative systems (Butler, 2004 and Richardson, 2011). The starkest example of this is in the state of Texas, where Governor Greg Abbot directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to conduct child-abuse investigations against caregivers7 who pursue gender-affirming-care (Bouranova, 2022). While numerous groups have pushed back against this policy’s deliberate attempt to police transgender children and their families, their advocacy campaigns have failed in two key respects. First, although dominant voices against Abbot’s directive8 critique the policy’s ignorance of gender as a social construct, the movement has only partially conceptualised sex as a categorisation system embedded within political, social and cultural power relations. As a result, it has perpetuated, rather than deconstructed, Christian-medical discourses arguingthat sexis a‘scientific’category.Fromthis view, all humanscan andshouldalign with the socialised gender norms aligned with sex. To demonstrate these gaps, I rely heavily on Fausto-Sterling’sunderstandingofDynamic-SystemsTheory.Second,thiscountermovement’shave not recognised their work’s intersections with movements against family regulation in poor communities of colour (Washington, 2022) as well as the inability of individual legal equality to address violence at the population level (Spade, 2015). As the upEND movement to end family policing makes clear, “The child welfare system is predicated on the subjugation, surveillance, control, and punishment of mostly Black and Native communities experiencing significant poverty” (Dettlaff, 2021).

7 I use the term caregiver to refer to biological and adoptee parents as well as physicians, doctors and therapists who provide care for children. Each of these groups is liable to prosecution under Abbot’s directive.

8 While I refer to Abbot’s directive throughout this analysis, it is important to note that Abbot relies heavily on references to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal brief arguing that gender-affirming care for minors is child abuse.

Based on this assertion, I suggest that the movement against Abbot’s directive must consider how liberal equality’s individualist framing and inability to contest disciplinary power against populations hurts, rather than supports, marginalised populations (Spade, 2011). In demonstrating these two critiques, I argue that these movements can create a far more comprehensive and intersectional approach to combatting not only Governor Abbot’s directive but also the cultural assumptions which empower the violent regulation of intersectional queer bodies.

Positioning attacks on gender affirming care within hegemonic Christian ideals of sex

Contesting the idea that sex is grounded in biology, gender is a cultural construct and sexuality is completely biological or completely social, Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling Employs Dynamic Systems Theory (2000). Stemming from other sexuality theorists like Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz as well as developmental-systems theorists, Fausto-Sterling critiques the dominant view that social and biological categories are fundamentally oppositional. Instead, she positions them as mutually constituting one another since the very production of knowledge regarding biological concepts like sex are fundamentally constrained by society (ibid, 2000). “Scientists do not simply read nature to find truths to apply in the social world. Instead, they use truths taken from our social relationships to structure, read, and interpret the natural” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). More recently, more authors have embraced this critique, pointing out thatwhiletherearebiological realities, the ways westudy bodies and the categorical conclusions these studies lead to, are shaped through cultural and social hegemonies (Fuentes, 2022).

In demonstrating the links between ‘scientific’ disciplines like psychology, brain science and endocrinology with social constructions of sex and gender, Fausto-Sterling alludes to the ways in which Dynamics-Systems also provides a useful critique of Conservative-Christian views on sex as naturally binary (p. 78-79). Namely, sex is biologically male or biologically female. Through this lens, individuals outside this binary transgress their nature (Fuist, Stoll and Kniss, 2012). Therefore, societal institutions like the church, government or family are meant to ensure the two categories' sanctity. Importantly, numerous scholars have pointed out how LGBTQ groups also shift their language, practices and organising to fit these dominant assumptions (Fuist et. al., 2012; Fetner, 2008 and Kane, 2013). In building on these ideas, the first part of this analysis will demonstrate the extent to which LGBTQ movements against Governor Abbot’s directive have remained limited by Christian-medical frames.

Similarly, theorists have demonstrated the ways in which children mark a particularly important social location for protecting Christian binaries pertaining to sex (Fischer, 2011). More specifically, “purity” is positioned as a sought-after ideal. Children, while born “pure”, are easily corrupted through their exposure to society. As such, recent policies criminalising gender- affirming care for transgender children as child-abuse are best viewed as an attempt to protect sex in its most “natural” form. In extreme cases, transgender children are positioned as “groomed” into their identities through their exposure to LGBTQ people (Romano, 2022). From this frame, children deviate from biological categories when caregivers fail to protect them from corruption. As this analysis will demonstrate, LGBTQ advocacy relies on similar frames.

These framings are not merely theoretical. Rather, a close look at Focus on the Family demonstrates their social influence. Focus on the Family is a dominant Christian advocacy group in the United States which views the family as a “God-ordained institution” that can be encouraged by “sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible” (Focus on the Family, 2022). In 2021 alone, Focus on the Family spent 29 1 million USD, 28 percent of their budget, on activities

related to “parenting”and presentednumerous advocacyresources against not only gender-affirming care, but transgender children more broadly (Focus on the Family Annual Report, 2021). Sex, as the previous analysis expects, is framed as natural and biological. As such, it can and must be ‘correctly’ enforced through social institutions (Focus on the Family, 2022). Equally as important, the heteronormative family and child are positioned as sacred, pure and in need of protection. In fact, their “About Us” section states, “we believe God has ordained the social institutions of family, church, and government. Therefore, Christians are called to influence these institutions according to God’s design and purpose” (Focus on the Family, 2022). Focus on the Family therefore frames transgenderidentityasa“disorder”ofawayfromdivinitywhichmustbe“treated”or“fixed”through social intervention (Johnson, 2015).

Of course, these views have a political impact. More specifically, based on the idea that transgender identities are bad for society, most Christian voters believes it requires correction (Brown, 2022). In fact, Texas Governor Abbot used similar reasoning to justify criminalising caregivers who provide gender-affirming care to minors. “Childhood-onset gender dysphoria has been shownto have ahigh rateofresolution”(Washington, 2022). Furthermore,"theywould deprive the child of the fundamental right to procreate, which supports a finding of child abuse under the Family Code" (Abbot, 2022). Based on the idea that individual identity can change to fit ‘nature’ and support heteronormative family structures, Abbot reifies binary sex and the importance of reproducing heteronormative families; largely falling in line with Christian rhetoric. Each seek to discipline caregivers who affirm children refusing to conform to binary ‘natural’ male-female categories.

Ambiguous frames, silences and overlaps: empowering Christian medical discourse

Although onemight expect thatAbbot’s conservativeorderwouldoverlapwithChristiandiscourses, there are also surprising links with The Trevor Project, a national organisation seeking to provide social, emotional and educational support to LGBTQ youth (The Trevor Project, 2020). Rather than unequivocally assert that sex is social, they sometimes position sex as a biological category. Given that The Trevor Project spent over 20 million USD in 2020 to provide critical mental health services to 1.8 million highly vulnerable individuals, 147,000 of whom resided in Texas (p. 17) as well as its prominent role in debates regarding transgender rights, it offers a useful means for understanding LGBTQ opposition to the Christian right.

Meanwhile, the ACLU and Lambda Legal, do not mention sex while also falling into Christian medical discourses regarding gender-affirming care. Therefore, given the extent to which these categories are utilised, as Fausto-Sterling makes clear, “to achieve a social result” (2000, p. 80), critiquing their replication within LGBTQ movements is crucial to combat the directive. More specifically, The Trevor Projects sometimes problematises the distinction between gender and sex in its online resources for transgender and gender non-conforming youth. “In fact, gender and sex exist on a spectrum, meaning that there are a lot of different ways that people can express their gender identity or sex” (Weaver, 2022). However, while this framing is useful for elucidating how sex can exist outside of binaries, does not provide context into sex’s epistemological grounding in heteronormative ideals. Furthermore, the same page goes on to state, “When we’re born, a doctor assigns us a sex. This has to do with our biology, chromosomes, and physical body. Male babies are generally assumed to be ‘men’ and female babies are generally assumed to be ‘women’”. Although the Trevor Project notes how neither gender nor sex are binary, they obfuscate this idea by positioning gender as a “social construct” (Weaver, 2022) and sex as emerging from

biological realities. While this framing demonstrates how The Trevor Project views gender as mutable, it fails to provide context for the ways in which biology is also a highly contested and socialised discipline (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

Cementing this construction, the second sentence refers to “gender assigned at birth” even after saying that a doctor assigns us a sex. By conflating these terms, they position gender as a social construct liable to contestation without clarifying if sex is a similarly contested category. Of course, the ACLU and Lambda Legal, the two primary civil liberties and LGBTQ rights organisations directing lawsuits against the order, do not reference sex at all in their press releases. Rather than view this silence as a lack of conformity to Christian discourses, instead, it illuminates the ways in which this discourse cements sex as a completely uncontested, scientific reality. Their collective silence thus reinforces these norms.

Each of these organisations also build on Christian frames by positioning gender-affirming care in medical binaries. Just as Abbot argues that this care is “not medically necessary” (p. 4), The Trevor Project notes that “Access to gender-affirming medical care, has been found to be significantly linked to lower rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts among transgenderandnon-binaryyouth"(Weaver,2022).Similarly,theACLUargues,“Gender-affirming care for the treatment of gender dysphoria is medically necessary care, full stop” (ibid, 2022). Of course, unambiguously asserting that gender-affirming care is medically necessary creates a powerful account of transgender youths’ lived experiences. Furthermore, it disrupts the directive’s legality since Abbot concedes that “in rare circumstances” gender-affirming care for minors is legal if it “is borne out of medical necessity” (Abbot, 2022). However, this framing still fails to critique the social circumstances which make this care necessary. Namely, sex, as a reified binary category, makes it impossible to recognise biologies different from ‘male’ and ‘female’ binaries as normal. As such, we need to broaden our conception of sex to Fausto-Sterling’s (Richardson, 2000) and Fuente’s (Abbot, 2022) understanding of Dynamic Systems Theory, through which biological characteristics are viewed as mutually informed through the expectations, decisions and norms born out of power dynamics in research, culture and society. Recognising that power relations determine the types of knowledge which become hegemonic, opens a far deeper critique of sex as a classification system. Merely conforming to Christian medical binaries without substantively disrupting their power, fails to move away from a categorising system that demands alignment with arbitrary and reductionist hormonal differences. This makes it possible for policies like Abbott’s to seem grounded in science and morality, rather than through a lens of social discrimination and heteronormative dominance. However, without a reified state of nature to fall back on, “deviation” can more accurately be contested as a misleading term. Rather, the existence of a diverse range of bodies, psychologies and endocrine systems which do not align with biological accounts of male and female make it clear that difference, whether developedthroughone’slife course or apparent at birth,is farmore ‘natural’ than uniformity (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Fuentes, 2022). Therefore, while this terminology may appear inconsequential, our flawed understanding of human characteristics as existing within immutable binaries limits this movement’s capacity to undermine the logics guiding Abbot’s directive. It is also important to include a brief clarification. I am not arguing that gender-affirming care for many in the trans community is vitally important and lifesaving. Rather, I am pushing our movements to incorporate a more radical vision of a society where we recognise the dynamic and largely constructed nature of all categorisation systems.

In addition to maintaining Christian frames, the fight against Abbot’s directive has also failed to ground itself in an intersectional approach that incorporates a broader movement against family regulation. By instead focusing on individual legal cases and targeted advocacy which position transgender youth and their caregivers as a monolithic group, the ACLU, Lambda Legal and The Trevor Project all do little to counter systemic violence. As Spade makes clear in his critique of liberal equality, LGBTQ movements and even more radical theories like Fausto-Sterling’s (2000), often focus on the social or epistemological regulation of gender/sex as the only mechanism for population-level management (Spade, 2011). However, the state often consciously and unconsciouslyenforces population managementonabroaderscalethrough administrativecategories and racist institutions (Spade, 2011). These impact transgender people but have a far greater impact on communities of colour, migrants, people living in poverty and trans people of colour who live at the intersection of these marginalised categories. As Spade notes, these systems have concrete impacts on the duration and potential of trans lives (ibid, 2011). For this reason, LGBTQ movements must pursue forms of advocacy which do not merely contest gender as a categorising system but instead transform or abolish wider systems of family regulation. Although Abbot’s directive is still quite recent, scholars have already built similar arguments as Spade by focusing on the directive’s connections to family regulations which police caregivers based on race, class, national origin and gender. “The weaponising of the family regulation system against transgender children and their parents in the Texas case, while exceptionally cruel, fits into a much larger project of producing fear to maintain white heteronormative order through family regulation” (Washington, 2022). As Washington makes clear, these policies, while rooted in history, are not purely historical. Rather, the state continues to weaponise family separation as a threat to ensure that white, cisgender, upper class family ideals remain dominant. For example, in Texas, black children were twice as likely as their white peers to be separated from their families (Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, 2019). In some counties, Child Protective Services conducted five times more investigations into black families (Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, 2019). Similarly, Abbot has separated thousands of families under “Operation Lone Star”; using state funds to incarcerate adults crossing the Mexican border while also detaining their children (Binion, 2021).

Given the scope of this problem, critiquing family regulation against caregivers of transgender youth without a broader attention to family regulation’s more pervasive forms, fails to engage this directive in an intersectional manner. Organisations combating the directive stand to provide more comprehensive and long-term protections by widening their scope. Unfortunately, as the next section will demonstrate, Lambda Legal and the ACLU’s press statements confronting the policy fail to take on a more direct, comprehensive, and historically contextualised account of race, class and national origin. Meanwhile, The Trevor Project does not discuss how these categories of difference critically influence transgender mental health (Weaver, 2022).

Both Lambda Legal and the ACLU focus on individual, constitutional rights and fall into Christian frames of children’s innocence when defending their opposition to the directive. Most notably, to confront the directive, both organisations filed a lawsuit in Texas State Court on behalf of three families pursuing gender-affirming care for their child (ACLU, 2022). While the ACLU supports the decriminalisation of sex work, the end of family detention and a reduction in the US prison population by 50 percent (ACLU, 2022), its advocacy against Abbot’s directive fail to specifically embrace these intersectional issues or even mention the disproportionate impact that

Incorporating intersectional critiques of family regulation into Advocacy: moving beyond a legal approach

family regulation has on communities of colour (Dettlaff, 2021). In the first press release from the ACLU regarding their lawsuit against Governor Abbot, Adri Perez, policy and advocacy strategist for Texas stated, “It is indefensible for any state leader to repeatedly attack trans Texans and weaponise the child welfare system against the loving families of transgender kids and teens” (ACLU, 2022). Although Perez correctly critiques the child welfare system for attacking these families, they also maintain the possibility that the welfare system can exist without being weaponised. In other words, families who are not loving may deserve regulation. However, as the upEND movement to end family policing makes clear, who and what practices constitute a “loving family” versus those marked as dangerous, are largely based on dominant white, colonial ideals that perpetuate violence against indigenous, black and immigrant communities in the United States (Williams, 2021).

The ACLU goes on to state, “If it takes a court ruling to ensure that the law protects families who lead with love in support of transgender Texans, so be it.” First, these racist cultural norms which regard certain families as loving and others as not continue to be reinforced without opening space for a broader conception of what it means to love and care for one’s child. In addition, the concept of childhood innocence fits neatly into the Christian attempts to defend ‘purity.’ Rather than question the racialised logics behind hierarchical interventions into certain families and children’s lives, the ACLU similarly frames children as pure and in need of protection. While they may indeed need protection, this framing perpetuates Christian frames while ignoring why certain children are forced into regulatory systems and others are not. Finally, this statement also reveals an assumption that legal equality will lead to substantive improvements for transgender youth. However, as Spade makes apparent, legal protections for individuals experiencing intentional discrimination ignore the ways in which social “interventions” determine who is valued and who is diminished (advertently and inadvertently) in broader regulatory systems (Spade, 2015).

The advocates’ ineffective and decontextualised reliance on problematic legal mechanisms is also apparent in Lambda Legal’s arguments. “By upholding the injunction, the court credited the finding that investigations based solely on the provision of medically necessary gender affirming care cause irreparable harm” (Lambda Legal, 2022). From this lens, Lambda Legal does not categorically critique family welfare as a discriminatory population management system. In particular, the word “solely” draws a clear distinction between regulation against caregivers of transgender youth and those families who are marked as ‘real’ abusers. The ACLU offers a similar frame. “Wemust takeastandagainst government leadersthat arehell-bent onstokingfear and trying to criminalise transgender young people and their families” (ACLU, 2022). Therefore, transgender children and their parents are positioned as ‘more innocent’ than other potentially abusive families in turn attempting to protect individual families in the context of a regulatory system which marginalises and abuses poor people of colour and transgender individuals alike. Although Lambda Legal and the ACLU deem family policing unjust in this specific context, by continuing to rely on legal advocacy to contest the directive as an individual instance of abuse, they empower the welfare system’s legal legitimacy to disproportionately and systemically police poor families of colour and transgender individuals (Space, 2015). As Spade makes clear, “these strategies are not only failing to improve the life chances of the people they are supposed to help, but also strengthening the criminal punishment system by allowing it to appear fair and neutral” (Brenan, 2011). Therefore, by merely focusing on and framing individual cases as outliers, both organisations “enhance” legal and regulatory institutions which systematically abuse marginalised groups (Brenan, 2011).

Conclusion

Each ofthesemovements is doing important work.Theiradvocacyhas thepotentialto providesafety and affirmation to transgender children and their caregivers in a highly precarious and dangerous time. However, their response to Abbot’s directive reveals how they also fail to provide a radical alternative to Christian medical discourses regarding sex, gender, and gender-affirming care. Even more apparent, by either remaining silent or actively embracing individual legal solutions to policies which control marginalised populations, they empower a family regulation system committing violence against groups who do not conform to white, heteronormative, and upper-class norms. In addition to providingresources to transgenderchildren,thesemovements needto reorient theirsocial frames to embrace a more radical critique of sex as hegemonic, arbitrary mechanism for categorisation. Simultaneously, rather than merely contest discrimination, they must seek to abolish family regulation as a racist, classist and heteronormative system.

References

Binion, B. (2021). Gov. Greg Abbott Will Reportedly Separate Families and Throw Some Undocumented Migrants in Prison. Reason.com. [online] Available at: https://reason.com/2021/06/18/greg-abbott-immigrants-briscoe-prison-unit-texas/ Bouranova, A. (2022). Explaining the Latest Texas Anti-Transgender Directive. [online] Boston University. Available at: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/latest-texas-anti-transgenderdirective-explained/.

Brenan, M. (2021). Changing One’s Gender Is Sharply Contentious Moral Issue. [online] Gallup. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/351020/changing-one-gender-sharply- contentiousmoral-issue.aspx.

Brown, A. (2022). Deep partisan divide on whether greater acceptance of transgender people is good for society. [online] Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/11/deep-partisan-divide-on-whether- greateracceptance-of-transgender-people-is-good-for-society/.

Chappell, B. (2022). Texas Supreme Court OKs state child abuse inquiries into the families of trans kids. NPR. [online] 13 May. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/13/1098779201/texassupreme-court-transgender-gender- affirming-child-abuse.

Dettlaff,A.,Weber,K.,Pendelton,M.,Bettencourt,B.andBurton,L.(2021). HowWeendupFuture Without Family Policing. [online] Available at: http://upendmovement.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/06/How-We-endUP-6.18.21.pdf

Fausto S., Anne. (2000). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books Fischer, N. (2011). Purity and Pollution: Sex as a Moral Discourse. In Seidman, S., Fischer, N.L., and Meeks, C. (Eds.). Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: 2nd Edition (1st ed.). Routledge https://doi-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9780203829837

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The Sarayaku Peoples:A Long Fight to Reclaim Their Rights

By Fernanda González Ronquillo, Ecuador

Introduction

Ecuador is a multi-ethnic country with 14 nationalities and 18 indigenous peoples (Go Raymi, n.d.). Among them is the Sarayaku people, who belong to the Kichwa community of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and which have approximately 1,600 inhabitants (Sarayaku, n.d ). The Sarayaku people considerthemselves as childrenofthegreat jaguar and perhaps that explains theirstrength to confront the Ecuadorian State and oil corporations, as well as their consistency to become a symbol of resistance for many indigenous communities in the region. In this essay, I will analyse the strategic actions of the Sarayaku in their struggle to gain recognition by the Ecuadorian State. The Sarayaku struggle started more than 30 years ago when they began to resist the Ecuadorian State. In 1992 what is known as the first uprising ignited, where several communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon marched to the capital, Quito, to demand the government legalise the land titles of the territory they inhabit (Bravo, 2017). The government yielded and this was the first battle that the Sarayaku won. However, just 4 years later, the government granted a block of Sarayaku territory for oil exploration to an Argentinean company, and 10 years later they entered Sarayaku territory without communal permission to begin with the exploration on community land (InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, 2012). At that time, the Constitution of 1998 was in force and recognised some collective rights and responsibilities regarding indigenous communities, including the obligation to consult them on plans for the exploitation of non-renewable resources in their territory (Asamblea de la República del Ecuador, 1998). However, it also allowed indigenous communities to benefit from these projects and receive compensation in cases of any damage caused by corporations. Thus, since the 1998 Constitution, there have been constitutional guarantees to defend social and community rights for indigenous peoples (ibid, 1998).

Once, the Sarayaku faced the invasion of the Argentinian oil company, CGC, and this is a good example that shows what they had to confront. They organised themselves as a community, but also legally to prevent the destruction of their territory and their lifestyle. During the invasion, the Sarayaku created the Campamentos de Paz y Vida (Peace and Life Camps), where the whole community went to the mountains to organise themselves and defend their territory (Romero, 2018). This was the first time where they had to directly confront the State, who used military interventions to harm and kidnap members of the community, in alliance with CGC’s workers (Pueblo Indígena Kichwa de Sarayaku VS. Ecuador, 2012).

The Sarayaku community has been historically organised, and since the beginning, they have used legal mobilisation as a tool to fight for their rights and their leaders have the obligation to know the legal corps in order to defend their rights (Sarayaku, n.d.). An understanding of the concept of legal consciousness is central to understanding the capacity of legal mobilisation since it settles in people’s perceptions of the law and legal enforcement (Hertogh, 2014; as cited in Handmaker, 2019). As the Sarayaku have been a community with several state interventions due to mining and oil concessions, they have been able to organise themselves politically to ensure that their way of life is respected and above all, that their constitutional rights are recognised (Sarayaku, n.d.).

Sarayaku inner organisation

To better comprehend the Sarayaku people, one must examine their inner organisation since it is key for understanding their decision-making capacity. Sarayaku people have organised themselves internally through two entities. First, through the Tayjasaruta, which is their governing council, and second, through the People's Assembly. The Tayjasaruta is made up of Sarayaku community leaders, who are elected as president, vice president, treasurer, and representatives of health, land, education,

and external relations, but also includes a Kuraka (traditional leader), the Yakak (shamans), and representatives of internal women's and youth organisations (Chavez, Lara Ponce & Moreno, 2005). Thepresident ofthe Tayjasarutahas an important rolein thecommunity's external relations,as he/she is the one who defends the interests of the Sarayaku people at the national, regional, and international levels. This is why this leader should be someone who understands different ways of life and can communicate the community's demands to outsiders (Chávez, Lara Ponce & Moreno, 2005). On the other hand, the Assembly discusses the most relevant decisions for the community at the local level. But it is the leaders of both entities who oversee the community's interests, without neglecting the cultural and social heritage that they possess (Chávez, Lara Ponce & Moreno, 2005).

Sarayaku in local politics

According to Madlingozi (2014), social movements are collectives of marginalised actors who develop a shared identity and organise themselves to achieve their long-term objectives. This relates to how the Sarayaku community has decided to intervene actively in national politics, for example, they are present in the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalitites of Ecuador (CONAIE), that during the period 2008-2011 had a Sarayaku president, Marlon Santi, who is also the national coordinator of the political party Pachakutik. The latter was the alternative political party of indigenous groups, who moved away from the null vote to support the creation of the Plurinational Unity Movement Pachakutik. This party sought to advance the political interests of various indigenous organisations in Ecuador and, in the last elections of 2021 managed to reach second place in the votes for the National Assembly, becoming the second political force in Ecuador (Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik, n.d.). Pachakutik has politicians from the Sarayaku community, who have reached seats in the Assembly, and who have made the Sarayaku struggle an issue of national relevance. Their participation in politics can be explained as one of the steps that this community took to organised themselves and that allows them to expose their realities to a society that struggles to understand them.

The Sarayaku are a remarkable example of organisation, strategic litigation and association. This community has linked with different actors in society to assert their collective rights and have chosen to form a political party as a tool to keep their issues exposed. For example, in 2014, the Sarayaku people gave asylum in their territory to three opposition politicians sentenced for insulting the then President Rafael Correa. The former president then declared that "the Sarayaku community is a highly politicised community" (Mena Erazo, 2014). However, being a politically organised community is what has allowed Sarayaku to defend and achieve objectives in terms of the struggle for their rights, being one of the few Amazonian communities that has put the national government in check through legal measures. Even though being political in these ways has been a mechanism that this community needed to use to fight for their rights and their visibility, it has also put them in the frontlines against threats and murder in a country where in the last 10 years, at least 449 environmental defenders were threatened, harassed, or killed (Basantes, 2021).

Strategic litigation: A tool to confront social injustices and rights violations

The struggles that indigenous communities have navigated respond to a State and society that have historically discriminated against Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous populations, despite being considered an intercultural and plurinational country (Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador, 2008). In communities of these minorities, it is possible to observe the structures of exclusion that continue to affect these groups, which is reflected in the lack of social investment in these communities and the lack of legitimisation of the problems they face (Fundación de Desarrollo Social Afroecuatoriana Azúcar, 2017).

Legal mobilisation can therefore be used as “an indispensable tool against any form of dominance and attempted hegemony” (Hoffman, 2003, p. 121; as cited in Handmaker, 2019). The

Sarayaku community has used legal and political opportunities to bring the struggles of their community, as well as those of other indigenous communities, to the table. Legal mobilisation has been one of the tools most used by this community to stop not only their social-political invisibility, but also to stop oil and mining exploitation in their territories. For a social group to mobilise there must be several variables that allow a group to sue, i.e., available legal stock, the rules determining legal standing, and the rules on legal costs are needed (Vanhala, 2018). In the case of Sarayaku, the creation a new constitution contributed to their search for legal justice.

Authors such as Vanhala (2018) mention that changes in the legal stock can create or limit opportunities for groups to formulate their legal demands in a decisive manner. In 2008, a new Constitution was enacted, which expanded the collective rights of indigenous groups, granting them the right to self-determination and territory. Additionally, nature was granted rights in this Constitution, making it a subject of law (Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador, 2008). The latter is aligned with the measures that the Sarayaku community has taken in order to exercise the rights they have been granted.

The Sarayaku community's first attempt at utilising international courts was in 2004, when they presented a formal request to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, where the Court granted provisional precautionary measures in favour of protecting their integrity and territory (Centro para la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional, n.d.). However, the State did not execute these measures, which led the Sarayaku community to request precautionary measures again, thus forcing the suspension of oil exploitation in their territory. Once this request was concluded in the Commission, the case was presented before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2010 (Centro para la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional, n.d.). In 2012, the IACHR ruled in favour of the Sarayaku people, finding the Ecuadorian State responsible for a series of constitutional violations such as the right to consultation, communal property, personal integrity, cultural identity and judicial guarantees (Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2012). The Courtalso settled on a series of reparatory measures by the Ecuadorian State, including the removal of approximately 1,400 kilograms of pentolite explosives buried in Sarayaku territory within three years and respect for the right to prior consultation (ibid, 2012).

This victory in international courts was an outstanding achievement for the Sarayaku people and for the indigenous peoples of the region, who saw in this ruling an opportunity to exercise their right to consultation, which has historically been ignored by the governments of the region (Amnesty International, 2012). However, for leaders like Patricia Gualinga, this victory is the beginning of a long fight that takes place under unequal conditions, as they face multinationals that are protected in many cases by the State (Riofrío, 2018). The efforts of civic actors are also conditioned by institutional structures and substantive law, which tend to benefit elites and the powerful (Handmaker & Arts, 2018). The use of international courts is also a tool that the Sarayaku have used since local courts tend to be biased towards big corporations, and respond to the extractivist interests of the government.

It is also important to highlight the translation capacity of the Sarayaku community, who have organised themselves for the defence of their rights with the support of international organisations, but by being themselves and translating a local problem to the international level, without controlling interventions of external actors (Merry, 2006). According to Brysk (2012), when an indigenous organisation is weak, they seek greater international solidarity to confront the State, while stronger organisations maintain the struggle at the local level. However, because access to justice in local courts is a controversial issue for Ecuadorian citizens due to corruption at this level, and according to Barnhizer, “when a legal system is controlled by corrupt interests for their own purposes without recourse for those harmed by its decisions, there has been a violation of human rights” (Barnhizer, 2001, p.16) It has therefore been easier for the Sarayaku people to advance their rights when the decision is made outside the Ecuadorian judicial framework.

International exposure: A tool for advancing their rights

In this sense, the Sarayaku community has made use of strategic litigation to stop oil exploitation in their territory. The Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a regional human rights organisation,hasbecometheSarayakucommunity'sgreatestallyininternationalcourts(CEJIL,n.d.). These types of organisations are constituted as support networks that allow them to stop attacks from the State, but also to confront large corporations that invade their territory (Benavides Banegas, 2009). Through their leaders, they have been able to expose the social problems their communitiesare going through, in such a way that their struggle has become known locally and internationally. The Sarayaku have participated in struggle not only for the respect of their territory and culture, but have also joined other struggles of civil actors, such as the fight against global warming, where they have raised their voices against oppressive governments and have protested mining exploitation in their territories (Sarayaku, n.d.).

Authors such as Handmaker and Matthews (2019) describe how civil actors also gain international visibility through civil interactions with communications media and global solidarity groups. These strategies are widely used by the Sarayaku community who have organised nationally andinternationallythroughallianceswithvarious environmentalgroups suchasYasunidos,whosued the Ecuadorian State to stop oil exploitation in the Yasuni ITT National Park. They haveused platforms such as Instagram or Facebook and through their new generation of young activists such as Nina and Helena Gualinga, they have communicated their struggles at the international level in various forums such as COP 26 (UN Climate Change Conference, 2021). Also, as a community they have a website where they explain all the legal and social processes that they have carried out to demand respect for their rights (Sarayaku, n.d ).

The Sarayaku people are also making an international claim called Kawsak Sacha or Living Forest, where they propose a legal recognition of territorial and nature rights for all indigenous peoples across the world. With this proposal, they demand that the Ecuadorian State recognises the Living Forest as a subject of rights and protection, and preserve sustainably the territories, as well as the material and spiritual relation between the Forest and the people who inhabit these spaces (Kawsak Sacha, n.d.). This declaration has been exposed in different local and international spheres, such as the National Assembly but also at the COP21 and COP23 (Kawsak Sacha, n.d ).

It is also necessary to mention that Sarayaku women have an active role within the political organisation of the community. Since the first uprising, women where the ones who convinced the male leaders to walk to Quito to fight for the title deeds for their territory (Gimenez, 2017). But nowadays, women’s associations are organised through the Asociacion de Mujeres de Sarayaku (Sarayaku Women’s Association), where they have taken political stands by denouncing military abuse in different indigenous communities, exposing their struggles in international forums, and fighting to gain political representation within the CONAIE (Biodiversidad, 2004; Gimenez, 2017).

Legal mobilisation canalso beconsideredas ashield against Stateabuses that enable achange of structures that perpetuate injustices and inequities (Handmaker and Matthews, 2019). Even if the State does not fulfil their obligations to this community, there exists legal stock and organisations that can support Sarayaku leaders in their aim to keep fighting for their rights, which provides protection and encouragement to these minorities. For example, despite the positive outcome of the judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Ecuadorian State has yet to comply with the reparation measures demanded (Farfan, 2019). Ecuador has only retired 14 kilos of pentolite in this territory (Farfan, 2019). In 2019, seven years after the judgment, Sarayaku then sued the State before the Constitutional Court for noncompliance with the judgment (Farfán, 2019). Therefore, the Sarayaku community has once again used strategic litigation to force the State to comply with the judgment.

The struggles of these communities reflect an explicit imbalance in power relations. Even though indigenous communities have rights detailed in the Constitution, they are still being considered second class citizens. It is therefore vital to recognise how this human rights struggle also

has a political dimension to it (Crawford and Andreassen, 2015). When the State diminishes the political aspect of their fight, it also denies the transformative capacity that legal mobilisation has for people that have been historically oppressed, since this has become the most efficient way for them to make their struggle visible.

DespitetheinternationaljudgementinfavouroftheSarayakupeople, thenationalgovernment has ignored their duties to this community, from not taking responsibility for the eradication of explosives in the area, to failing to change the local law in accordance with international standards. The Ecuadorian state has been clear in exposing their extractivist position by allowing international companies to tender for oil exploitation in Sarayaku and indigenous lands without complying with previous judgements and referendums with to these communities (Mcarnaney, 2016). The position of the State is clear, but so is the Sarayaku response to this disrespect of their social, cultural, and environmental rights. They will keep fighting.

To conclude, the Sarayaku people have shown that an organised community can be successful using strategic litigation. But they have also shown the power of joining international networks to defend their rights. The Sarayaku people became an example for all indigenous communities that they can confront powerful actors and get positive outcomes in international courts. This community have led an important path for other indigenous groups whose rights are threaten by the State or corporate actors. The Ecuadorian Constitution has adopted progressive articles that guarantee the rights for indigenous communities; however, the historic exclusion of these communities from the State has limited them fully in exercising their rights. The political organisation of Sarayaku leaders and the decision of the whole community to face the consequences of confronting the State have made them a highly respected community locally and internationally. The use of litigation has contributed for their recognition as part of the Ecuadorian society, but also provided a legal support for those who have been ignored and for those whose rights have not been respected. The Sarayaku people teach us that even if the road is long, they are going to keep fighting until the State and the Society treat them with the dignity and respect to which they are entitled.

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Sacrifice Zones in Chile: Contestations and Possible Reconfigurations of the Neoliberal Development Model

By Mariela Miranda van Iersel, Chile

Introduction

“Every new building blocks sunlight from someone, but no one would take this as a reason to halt construction” informs one news article from July 1957 upon the installation of the first smelter and refinery of copper at the commune of Puchuncaví, Chile (as cited in Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 343). This public statement reveals a logic of sacrifice in the name of ‘progress,’ and it was followed by the installation of fourteen other highly contaminating industries in the area. Several quantitative papers have achieved consistent results about the negative effects that exposure to these installations has on health (Cortés et al., 2019, p. 103). Unsurprisingly, years of pollution resulted in a socioenvironmental crisis that reached its definite explosion in 2018, when over 1,500 individuals suffered intoxications due to a saturation of pollutants present at the air level, soil, and coastlines (Céspedes and Rueda, 2019, p. 27).

Problematically, Puchuncaví is only one of the six ‘sacrifice zones’ in Chile. The term sacrifice zone has been applied worldwide to describe urban areas with exposure to extreme concentrations of environmental pollution caused by industrial activities – making it dangerous to even breathe or drink clean water at these locations (Lerner, 2010, pp. 3-4). In Chile, the notion of sacrifice zones gained popularity in 2015 after the mayors of five municipalities (Tocopilla, Huasco, Quintero, Coronel, and Puchuncaví) joined forces to demand a governmental response to the socio-environmental crisis experienced by their districts (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvett, 2020, p. 280). This achieved the recognition by the Chilean administration that their municipalities are sacrifice zones – representing a symbolic victory against the extractive dynamics of neoliberal development (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvett, 2020, p. 282).

Indeed, sacrifice zones in Chile have served as a long-standing strategy for the strengthening of neoliberal economic development, which anticipates that extractions will pave the way to socioeconomic progress (Arsel, Hogenboom and Pellegrini, 2016, p. 880). Ultimately, the conflict lies in that “communities and entire local ecosystems have been [increasingly] sacrificed in the name of ‘economic growth’ or ‘national prosperity’” (Valenzuela-Fuentes, Alarcón-Barrueto and Torres-Salinas, 2021, p. 2). Sacrifice zones for extraction are legalised and maintained by the Chilean government despite the evidence that states their detrimental consequence to welfare and health.

As top-down national policies and approaches to sacrifice zones have failed to resolve social injustices (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvett, 2020, p. 282), the aim of this essay is to understand the views and practices of individual agents who have organised themselves to resist and question the extractivist model of development. How many buildings should be built to cover sunlight from how many human beings? For this purpose, this paper will: (1) present contextual information about the legacies of dictatorship that have enabled sacrifice zones in Chile; (2) explain the environmental injustice that has incentivized bottom-up action, and (3) discuss the social movement that has resisted sacrifice zones and the possibility of buen vivir (living well) as an alternative development perspective.

Contextual factors enabling sacrifice zones

While the extraction of natural resources for exportation dates back to a dark colonial history in Latin America, it continues to be central to development policies and economic growth today (Arsel, Hogenboom and Pellegrini, 2016, pp. 880-881). Its contemporary relevance and promotion are related to the installation of a hegemonic neoliberal ideology.

The ideals of neoliberalism were provided by academics who theorised alternatives to the Keynesian-Fordism that dominatedpostwareconomies (Bateman,2006,p.272; Harvey,2005,p. 20). Chile became the neoliberal ‘guinea pig,’ as the neoliberal theories that had gained international popularity were tested and implemented to full extent during the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet that lasted from 1973 until 1990 (Spira, 2012, p. 134; Liverman and Vilas, 2006, p. 328).

Liverman and Vilas (2006) define neoliberalism as the “political philosophy or worldview of free markets and less government” (p. 329). In contrast to the earlier period of classical liberalism, neoliberalism does not assume that conduct takes an entrepreneurial form automatically. Instead, neoliberal regimes develop systemic and institutional practices for enacting this vision (Read, 2009, p. 28). In terms of the environment, neoliberal reforms led to the privatisation and commodification of resources such as water, forests, fisheries, copper, and energy production; the deregulation of environmental management; and trade and investment openness (Liverman and Vilas, 2006, p. 328). Alongside economic reforms, environmental legislation has also been influenced. Article 19 of the Constitution by Pinochet of 1980 states that all people have “the right to live in an environment free of contamination” and “it is the duty of the State to ensure that this right is not violated and that the environmentisprotected”(ascitedinVillasanaLópezetal.,2020,p.359).However,thesamesection explains exceptions to this statement, such as to ensure “the right to develop any economic activity/freedom of enterprise” (as cited in Villasana López et al , 2020, p. 359). Consequently, the legislation provides ample space for interpretation that allows for institutionalised environmental violence and the incentive “to side directly with business and ‘development’ interests” (Carruthers, 2001, p. 349).

Ultimately, the neoliberal institutional developments and the legislative changes that took place during the dictatorship in Chile have enabled the expansion of extractive activities and the creation of sacrifice zones, where the interests of private companies are valued over the environment and the health of citizens. This neoliberal development model not only transformed institutions and legislation, but it also extended to the organisation of subjects into new categorizations - where social injustice assigns some as ‘credit-worthy’ and others as ‘credit-less’ (Demmers, 206, p. 70).

Environmental (in)justice

Environmental justice studies emerged as a body of interdisciplinary literature that documented the unequal impacts of the social and ecological costs of capitalist production on different social classes and racial/ethnic groups (Mohai, Pellow and Roberts, 2009, p. 406). Several studies have concluded that the burdens of environmental pollution do not affect us all equally, as some communities carry the burden of sacrifice zones while others enjoy their benefits (Holifield, Chakraborty and Walker, 2017, p. 1). This differentiated positioning forms the central problem of environmental injustice, which when applied to the difference principle of John Rawls, “the issue is not of inequality per se but that of justified inequalities from the standpoint of the worst-off” (Baxi, 2016, p. 18). However, there is more at stake than distributive justice, as there is also a need for fair and equal participation and recognition of those groups that are marginalised, disadvantaged, and less powerful in the conversation about how to solve and act against environmental burdens (Baxi, 2016, p. 18; Fraser, 1998, p. 5). According to Faber (2017), the disparities to experiencing the negative externalities of resource extraction stem from these power imbalances – where people are situated in different positionalities depending on class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and more (p. 62) Ultimately, the “various social positions or ‘identities’ held in these power structures intersect to create different social ‘axes’ of advantage and disadvantage” in regard to environmental justice (Faber, 2017, p. 62). Those that are the most disempowered tend to receive the most environmental disadvantages, as they possess fewer resources to defend themselves against environmental injustice (Mohai, Pellow and Roberts, 2009, p. 414). Thus, the most cost-effective practices for extractive industries are those that offer the least political resistance. In Chile, this constitutes those territories

inhabited by lower-class identities who – immersed in poverty and lack of opportunities – end up engulfed in polluted sacrifice zones (Benavides, 2020, p. 10).

Resistance and alternatives to the extractivist development model

The economic and political structures that enable the discrimination of the least empowered for the benefit of capital accumulation have not remained unchallenged by the Chilean population. Heilinger (2020) proposes that injustices must be addressed from bottom-up approaches, where joint commitments and actions by individual agents can generate impact and change (p. 16). Given the disparities inenvironmentalburdens,localgovernments,organisations,andenvironmentalgrassrootmovements have previously organised to raise awareness about the commodification of natural commons and the multiple injustices experienced by communities living in sacrifice zones (Schaeffer and Smits, 2015, p. 147). However, the social movement of October 2019 was capable of creating a possibility for political transformation and a radically different development model. Millions of Chileans took over the streets to express their discontent with the neoliberal logic that was installed during the dictatorship of Pinochet and institutionalised in the Constitution of 1980. Not only were they demanding environmental justice, but they were also appealing to their right to health and education, dignified jobs, gender equality, respect for indigenous peoples, and an overall escape from the market logic that shaped their lives (Villasana López et al , 2020, p. 355). The recognition of the local injustices of sacrifice zones as connected to the larger injustices of neoliberalism and the recruitment of other affected identities allowed for the initial success of this movement.

This social movement that encompasses all axes of domination resulted in the construction of a new Chilean Constitution which would overcome the model inherited from the dictatorship that prioritises capital accumulation over health and welfare. Thus, the movement was successful in challenging theneoliberal hegemonicorderand openingpossibilitiesforsocietyto transform andproduce itself in an alternative manner (Pleyers, 2020, p. 9). However, this initial outcome towards a radically different development model supported by a new Constitution was recently rejected by the Chilean population. Given the current context of unknowns and possible phases of transformation, it is important to have narratives about other ways of life readily available (Pleyers, 2020, p. 10).

Socio-environmental movements are devising new alternatives that challenge the current development hegemony that enables sacrifice zones (Arsel, Hogenboom and Pellegrini, 2016, p. 882). Examples of alternative narratives are the degrowth perspective, the Indian ecological swaraj, and the Latin American approach of buen vivir. The concept of buen vivir is an alternative development model that recuperates the approaches of ancestral indigenous communities (García, 2016, p. 114). However, Villasana López et al. (2020) explain:

“Far away from yearning for the past, embracing buen vivir entails reimagining and recreating the present by collectively learning from knowledges, experiences, epistemologies, and cosmologies that have been historically marginalised by modern capitalist development in Latin America” (p. 16).

Consequently, buen vivir is an ongoing proposal that encompasses a diversity of worldviews that converge in their belief to go beyond the current understanding of progress and their ethic that values a harmonious relationship between nature, humans, and non-humans (Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 12). Thus, buen vivir moves away from an understanding of nature as a commodity that can be used as a resource for economic gains and humans as an additional material incorporated into the chain of production. Instead, buenvivir fosters collaborative andsustainable projects at thelocal level where ecotourism, subsistence fishing, and urban agroecological practices flourish.

Conclusion

This essay initially explained how the neoliberal legacies of the dictatorship in Chile have enabled the creation and maintenance of sacrifice zones that are detrimental to the environment and the welfare of citizens. Later, it presented how this hegemonic model of development has affected individual subjects who live under environmental injustice. Finally, it discussed the bottom-up resistance by social movements that grew impatient due to inaction by the State and joined forces with other movements to battle neoliberalism and move towards alternative understandings of development such as buen vivir.

Ultimately, while many individual agents have become disenchanted from the neoliberal state that enablessacrificezones andenvironmental injustice, and haveresistedthroughsocialmovements, this struggle cannot be reduced to Chile or to the periphery: it is universal and global (Heilinger, 2020, p. 5). Our contemporary world is characterised by connections and interactions, such that a new ideology in Chile cannot escape the effects of the hegemonic neoliberal ideology worldwide that sustains the lavish lives of some individuals to the detriment of the health of others and our planet as a whole.

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Building a Care System for Chile with the Communities at the Centre

By Amparo Arias Bravo, Chile

Introduction

In the context of the Chilean social outbreak and institutional processes that subsequently emerged, the feminist movement has constantly demanded the necessary redistribution of care work in society. This has paved the way for the care agenda to have relevance in the constituent process and the programmatic proposals of the new government (Convención Constitucional, 2022; Apruebo Dignidad, 2021; Presidencia de la República, 2022). At the same time, there is a proliferation of localities governed by social leaders, with feminist governments that have made care policies a priority at the municipal level. In tune with this enabling context, a National Care System is being developed by the current central government administration and is part of one of the main pillars of what they call their feminist policy. In this process, the main challenges have consisted in building a system that meets the objective of defamiliarising and defeminising care with a community and territorial perspective.

The following policy recommendations are intended as guidelines for public policymakers of the central government (specifically the Ministries of Women and Gender Equity and Social Development) and of the local municipalities that recently formed feminist networks of support. As such, this policy brief aims to contribute to the discussion and elaboration of a care policy with a situated perspective, which places the priorities of caregivers and feminist organizations at the centre.

Expressions of the care crisis in Chile

Patriarchalcapitalismisincreasinglyshapinganuncaringworld,rewardingthose whoseekindividual interest and maximisation of self-utility and penalising those who care and commit their life to it (Folbre, 2014). The unequal organization of care in which the modern world is structured places the responsibility to care on the shoulders of feminised, racialised, impoverished, and migrant bodies. Faced with the multiple transformations that recent times have brought, such as demographic, climatic, economic, and social changes, the ways in which we perform care are in crisis. Following Fraser (2016), the crisis of care, “refers to the pressures from several directions that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities: those available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally” (p. 1).

However, given that care is an essential and earthly condition, extremely necessary for human reproduction, the fact that care is at risk implies a tension on a larger scale; in fact, what is at stake is a crisis of social reproduction.

In Chile, this crisis has many expressions, the demographic transition, changes in household composition, and transformations in the labour markets have led to an expansion of the demand for care. Accompanied by income inequality, the privatisation of social rights and the constant pressure to reduce public spending on social provision systems, this increased demand has been absorbed mainly by families and communities.

Accordingto ECLAC, female participation in economicactivity in Chilereached 47.1percent by 2020 (CEPALSTAT, 2022), meaning that 52.9 percent of the working-age population was considered "inactive". However, if this category is disaggregated into more specific activity conditions, 15,8% of women of working age are exclusively engaged in domestic and care work, a figure that increases for the lowest income groups (24.4 percent in quintile 1 and 19.6 percent in quintile 2). At the same time, the data show that 69.5 percent of women in Chile do not participate

for family reasons (ECLAC, 2019). This distribution of care responsibilities is expressed in the use of time within households, where women spend 42.4 hours per week on unpaid work while men spend only 19.4 hours per week (CEPALSTAT, 2022).

These figures express what Beneria (1995) describes when she talks about the biases of traditional economic analysis, where women working for subsistence are considered non-productive or unemployed (Ustek, 2015). Faced with this invisibilisation, understanding care as a distributional struggle(Folbre,2014)anddirectingactionsinsearchofafairersharingoftimeisawayofrethinking a socioeconomic model that allows us to value these activities and perform lives outside the current critical conditions described. Therefore, installing a care system can redistribute the time of those who assume the costs of care, opening space for some bodies to assume greater care responsibilities and others to free up time.

Care agenda in Chile: From the social demands to a programmatic institutional response

Just as Gago (2018) mentions, the strike taken by the women's movement overflows and embraces those realities that are outside the borders of unionisation and paid work, these struggles put at the centre the central element of the capitalist system: the sexual and colonial division of labour (Mezzadri, 2020). Along these lines, and in the face of the social reproduction crisis expressed in Chile, feminist and caregivers' organisations have articulated and developed demands to respond to the unjust organisation of work and the precarious conditions in which care takes place. The synthesis of the last three plurinational encounters, one of the main instances of feminist organisations in Chile, has included in its list of demands a Plurinational System of Care with a territorial and community perspective (Coordinadora Feminista 8 de Marzo, 2019, 2020, 2021). The programs highlight the importance of being aware of the diversity of identities and peoples that inhabit the territory and the different worldviews they have about what care is and how they perform it. Also, the summary of the caregivers' encounter program, which brought together 20 caregiving organisations in 2020, incorporates in its demands the creation of a Support and Care System with national coverage and prioritising the optimal development in each region of the country (Mesa de Trabajo para la Promoción y Visibilización de los Cuidados, 2020). Issues such as the coresponsibility ofthestate,theimportanceofgivingdignity tocaregivers, the collectionofinformation for relevant policies, and the particularities of each territory within the country are dimensions included in their list of demands.

These demands have had repercussions in two crucial spaces for political transformation today: the draft of the new Constitution and the programmatic proposal of the new government. On the one hand, Article 10 of the newly proposed Constitution guarantees the right to care and the creation of an Integral Care System with parity, solidarity, cultural relevance, gender and intersectional perspective (Convención Constitucional, 2022, p. 94). On the other hand, the administration of the new government has recently announced the architecture of a National Care System (Presidencia de la República, 2022) and has already established in its main axes the elaboration of a registry of caregivers, the strengthening of home care programs, the promotion of training, universality, and care for the elderly in the Day Care Centers for the Elderly (Gobierno de Chile, 2022).

The roadmap for a system of care with a community perspective

In the last decade, Latin America has had different experiences with care systems, generating a roadmap in constructing the fourth pillar of social security in the region. Specifically, Uruguay's National Comprehensive Care System had two distinctive aspects compared to the provision systems developed in the Nordic countries: the central role of caregivers and the importance given to

community care. These policies developed from the South have had a particular focus on studying theinterrelationships ofthe different agents in thecarediamond(Razavi, 2007) -thestate,themarket, families and communities - and have given the latter an important role due to how care is organised in the region.

In short, implementing a care system implies integrating a completely new provision system into the social protection structure. In Latin America, these systems have considered three target populations as recipients of care: (1) children from 0 to 3 years of age, (2) populations over 65, and (3) permanently dependent populations. To this is added the preponderance of the caregiver population in the application of the system, promoting the economic autonomy, training and labour dignity of the caregivers. The system coordinates pre-existing care policies such as parental leave and kindergartens and deploys a new offer of community care centres, personal assistants, tele-assistance, among others (see annex 1 for more details).

However, in the Uruguayan system, there is significant room for improvement in how care is understood in the communities and how the state thinks of itself as a facilitator of the existing care networks. In the performance evaluation of the first five years, one of the key challenges is advancing in social co-responsibility - that is, in the distribution of care between the state, families, the community and the market (Sistema de Cuidados, 2020). To advance in greater social coresponsibility, the system defines that two processes need to be consolidated: collective bargaining among people working in the care sector and community participation with a solid territorial base. Therefore, the policy recommendations of this policy brief focus on interventions on community care that could strengthen the latter process.

• Childcare Cooperatives. One of the populations in which the Uruguayan system had problems in increasing coverage is early childhood (Sistema de Cuidados, 2020). The presence of children in the home increases the workload for women in the home, and, at that age, there is still strong resistance to sending children to care centres. However, many households with children at home rely on the help of family and community networks. Along these lines, promoting cooperatives for childcare can be a way of increasing coverage. In these cooperatives, the principal caregivers play a central role in running the care spaces, and time and money are distributed to organise care provision for a small group of children. People who can offer their time a few days a week receive a more significant subsidy for the payment of the service. The state has different roles in the functioning of the cooperative: (1) building a registry of caregivers who can perform the core work of care in the cooperative, (2) providing the physical place and the resources for its development and (3) supervising the provision. These spaces do not replace the existing and potential public care services but provide an alternative for those who do not send their children to larger care facilities.

• Day Care Centres for the Elderly. In Chile, women never stop caring, and even when they are over 70 years old, they spend 35 hours a week on unpaid work (Cooperativa Desbordada, 2020). Therefore, having care centres for the elderly means providing an opportunity to alleviate the working hours of those who have been caregivers all their lives. Incorporating policies that dignify old age, guarantee recreational spaces and promote the autonomy of the elderly population are ways of integrating retribution and reparation mechanisms into the care system. These centres are currently managed by local governments or privately, so there is a debt of the central government in promoting the creation of centres and supporting their implementation at the local level. There is also debt in including measures to prevent abuses and bad practices. A good example is the forms of internal co- governance with the active participationoftheelderlypopulationappliedinUruguay'scaresystem(SistemadeCuidados, 2020).

• Territorial Care Mapping. Many community care strategies are often invisible to state institutions. In this regard, it is essential to have better data to implement informed and

situated policies. Developing tools to make visible the time dedicated to care networks and how they support social reproduction is key to building policies with a territorial perspective. Although time-use measurement tools have been vital to measuring time within households, they still do not cover representatively rural areas and are biased concerning the expressions of care in different territories. One strategy that can be highlighted to address this invisibilisationistheexercisethatArgentinaisdoingtointegrateintothesystem'sarchitecture a tool for visualising care at the federal levels (Ministerio de las Mujeres y las Diversidades, 2021). In turn, other more incipient exercises of visualisation of community networks, developed by social organisations in Spain and Chile, can be helpful to shed light on the diversity of care developed in the localities (Ecologistas en Acción, 2021; Cooperativa Desbordada, 2022).

Towards a progressive and decentralised fiscal policy for care

The feasibility of a care policy with a community and situated perspective will depend on a series of structural factors of fiscal policy in Chile, firstly, on how state resources are distributed, more specifically, on the degree of centralisation of decisions on public resources. Currently, more than 90 percent of public spending depends on the central executive power (Dirección de Presupuestos, 2020), an issue that different municipality movements have criticised for restricting the decisionmaking capacity of the territories. In this sense, the ongoing constituent process will be crucial to determining a new way of executing public spending and could provide different sources of resources to develop care policies with a local perspective. In this sense, recent changes in the distribution of power in municipal governments, together with a new way of thinking about public spending, could strengthen programs such as those described above: networks and care centres that function collectively and with municipal support.

Secondly, these policy recommendations will depend on the size of the public budget and the possibility of developing a more progressive and fairer taxation system. Chile is the second most unequal country in the OECD and is the one that reduces inequality after taxes (OECD, 2021). The avoidance and evasion practices lose resources estimated at 7.6 percent of the GDP for 2017 (Accorsi and Sturla, 2020), in a country where spending on health and education corresponds to 4.9 percent and 5.2 percent of the GDP respectively (ECLAC, 2019). Therefore, the current administration's tax reform must have progressive redistribution at the centre and raise sufficient resources for an intensive care policy.

Finally, the possibility of sustainably financing a care system relies on the disposition of resources in the medium and long term. As mentioned above, the draft of the new constitution establishes an Integral Care System with "progressive, sufficient and permanent financing" (Convención Constitucional, 2022, p. 94), which implies that if the text is approved in September 2022, the financing of the system would be constitutionally guaranteed.

Conclusion

The architecture of the system and its development plan is still unknown as it depends on the proposal that will emanate from the central government and the subsequent legislative work. In this open window of political transformation, an emphatic vision of how the fourth agent of the care diamond is understood can be vital in directing resources towards the community networks in which care is developedtoday.Inordertoadvanceinthedefamiliarisationofcare,itisnotonlynecessaryto expand the provision of public services and increase the supervision and quality of private provision but also to strengthenthecommunitycarenetworks onwhichsocialreproduction is currently based,removing them from precariousness and guaranteeing that they are carried out within a framework of rights.

Table 1. Uruguay: Services and benefits provided by the Comprehensive National Care System.

Source: Bravo, Amparo (2022). Mapping exercise Comprehensive National Care System of Uruguay (2015-2020). Assignment for the course: ISS-4154 Critical Social Policy.

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Crafting Heritage and Reimagining Development With The Simon’s Town Museum

By Rebecca Mort, South Africa Introduction

Public museums, as institutions of heritage, history, and culture, form an important part of development frameworks and agendas, particularly in post-conflict societies. Museums provide spaces for knowledge creation and restoration, community building, and the value shaping of broader development agendas. The Simon’s Town Museum tells the history of Simon’s Town, a small coastal town outside of Cape Town, South Africa that is renowned for its beautiful natural scenery and complex heritage. From its precolonial indigenous histories to the founding of the town as a colonial naval base, from its apartheid legacies and traumas, to the current tourist portrayal of idyllic beaches featuring South Africa’s only Penguin colony, the town is full of contested histories and heritages. This can be felt and engaged with ecologically, culturally, politically, socially, spatially, visually, and aurally throughout the Simon’s Town Museum. The lineage of the town’s heritage is traced from archaeological evidence of stone age tools found at different sites in the town, to artefacts of the town’s colonial naval history,to theoral histories ofBlack families who wereforcibly removedunder apartheid. The Museum holds this diverse history of the town and creates powerful meanings of belonging, development, and heritage through its work.

The museum and the history of belonging in Simon’s Town

The Simon’s Town Museum exhibits the historical origins of the town, particularly its colonial roots as the Dutch East India Company (shortened as the VOC) established the natural bay for its winter anchorage in the era of contested colonial merchant trade routes between the West and the East. By the mid-1700s, a small town began to form that comprised of “mainly indigenous Khoisan people, VOC officials, soldiers and slaves that had been bought to the Cape from China, Indonesia, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, Zanzibar, Angola and other parts of West Africa”, as well as small groups of Europeans who were starting to settle on the Cape coastline (Simon's Town Museum, n.d.). In the late18th century,theBritish hadwrested control of theCapefrom theDutch, andthereaftertheBritish Royal Navy founded their permanent naval base in part of their broader colonisation of Southern Africa. Through the Royal Navy’s recruitment, sailors such as the Kroomen from West Africa and Muslim sailorsfrom Zanzibareventually settledin Simon’sTown.Peoplemigratedfrom islands such as St Helena and Tristan da Cunha, and traders from India set up businesses in the town. By the late 1880s amaXhosa people from the East coast of South Africa settled in the town after building the local railway and dockyards under British rule. More people immigrated and settled in Simon’s Town from across the world, including Italy, Lithuania, the Philippines, and more. The Museum writes in its section titled Descendants of Slavery. As a result of Simon’s Town’s global encounters with generations of travellers, settlers, slaves, indentured labourers, and our indigenous community; our families were closely interconnected and intermarried across racial and religious lines. (Simon's Town Museum, n.d.).

The critical engagement with this colonial history enables the Museum to honour the diverse community that built Simon’s Town. The life of the small town changed drastically when the apartheid government began its process of forced removals of Black people from many urban parts of the country in order to racially segregate the country. In Simon’s Town, those residents classified as Black and Coloured were forcibly removed from the town in 1965 and in 1968 respectively, and were relocated to informal settlements far from their previous homes, businesses and jobs. The Museum explains how this process “irrevocably destroyed the multi-cultural fabric of Simon’s Town

society” and devotes much of its current work to engaging with this history. The Museum initiated the Albert Thomas Oral History Project which seeks to “ensure that the stories of human rights violations and its impact are recorded as a step towards restorative justice and healing from the violence of apartheid”, while also aiming to “build a comprehensive research and exhibition programme to make the story accessible as an intergenerational tool for dialogue, education and intervention to both local and international audiences” (Simon's Town Museum, n.d.). The Museum works with elders who were forcibly removed, as well as their descendants, in order to preserve the memory and knowledge that communities’ stories hold of this period of history.

Through this work, the Museum creates new collaborative relationships with communities to the institution and relationships of belonging to town as well. In 1996, the Museum founded the Phoenix Committee, which provided a means for forcibly removed Simonites (former residents of the town) to develop heritage materials, educational programmes, family history archives and narratives, and memorialisation events and more that could honour the complex history of Simon’s Town. The Museum also initiated a memorialisation project called “Wag-n- Bietjie” benches (translated from Afrikaans into English as ‘wait a moment’, and which are a colloquial term for thornbush trees that commonly provide shaded rest-spots). There are several of these mosaiced benches placed across the town, and they serve as public sites of remembrance of the forced removals and the legacy of this period of history in the town today.

A powerful theme across the Museum’s space is therefore that of the history of migration in the town. As the community of Simon’s Town was born from indigenous and enslaved people, migrants, settlers and travellers to their descendants today, the Museum explores how migration, through colonialism, apartheid, and beyond, has affected “the social construction of space” (Meinhof, 2011). Thecomplexhistoryofmigrationthathas shaped thetown in both constructiveand destructive ways is analysed through the “networks of relationships” as they are formed in and through the town, with those who live there, were enslaved there, were brought there, worked there, were forcibly removed from there, and those who are present to the space today (Meinhof, 2011).

The Museum works with the lens of migration to critically examine notions of belonging and heritage in the town today, and also explores the intertwined nature of the histories of mobility and coloniality. The Museum opens up questions for contemporary development in Simon’s Town – who belongs in the town, who shares in the town’s wealth and heritage, who determines what space means and for whom – and these are essential in analysing the post-apartheid development era of South Africa.

Heritage, museums and development

Museums play a critical role in the South African development framework, as they represent spaces for the democratic government’s intentions of preserving cultural heritage and curating knowledge that reflects the complex history of the country. The Western Cape Provincial Government provides funding for the Simon’s Town Museum, and the department’s statement reads as follows:

“The Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport (DCAS) encourages excellence and inclusivity. We unite people through sport and culture to ensure a creative and active Western Cape. We bind our communities as a strong and unified nation and create opportunities through funding and collaboration.” (n.d.)

The Museum Service of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport aims to promote respect for cultural diversity in South Africa and appreciation of our natural heritage. The Museum Service therefore sets out to build understanding and pride of our diverse heritage through the affiliated museums (Western Cape Government, n.d.).

This discourse indicates how the curatorship of cultural, political, and ecological history and heritage through museums is seen as part of the provincial government’s mandate within a nationalist development strategy. The Simon’s Town Museum’s activities outside of curatorship and exhibitions

further emphasise the institution’s role within a development framework. It holds space for the public to engage with the history of the town, which is part of broader national and global historical processes,andhostsvariousactivitiessuchashistoricalwalkingtours,communitymarkets,toydrives for neighbouring communities, educational activities for schools, and more. The institution thus engages not only with past history, but with the living community of Simon’s Town and beyond, through these projects that contribute to local development. The Museum is accessible and entering costsadultsR10(€0 60)andchildrenR5(€0 30).Thisaffordabilitymakesitpossibleformanypeople to engage with the Museum and the knowledge therein, and places culture and history within an accessible public domain of knowledge, and not just within tourism development for an international audience.

The insights from the lenses of development studies, tourism work, heritage studies, conflict and memorialisation, community development, and international cooperation place the Simon’s Town Museum as an active institution within development discourses. Critical heritage studies provide an important framework to analyse the museum as an institution. In a mainstream development approach, the museum’s practices show how “heritage provides opportunities for job creation, infrastructure development, and education… through the promotion of heritage-based tourism” (Ndoro, 2021, p. 108). But in analysing the work of the Simon’s Town Museum deeper, it is clear that the institution goes beyond this. Its work reaches further than confines of the museum walls and spans across multiple temporalities. The Museum does not only consider a heritage of the past, it is community engagement work also fosters a “cultural heritage (that) also exists in the present…something that requires dealing with in our everyday lives” (Lane, 2021, p. 66). This is a development approach that does not focus solely on agendas of job creation, tourism or national identity construction. It also cultivates an understanding of development that is rooted the valuing of history, art as a healing process after conflict, and the restoration of culture, knowledge and heritage in building the path forward.

The practices of memorialisation of various points of history form part of the post-apartheid democratic government’s strategies of nation-building and reconstruction. There has been substantial critique regarding the limitations of meaningful socio-economic transformation in democratic South Africa, and much of this nationalist heritage work lies within the country’s “liberal peacebuilding” agenda (Blackmore, 2021). But the radical transformative potential of museums and heritage sites are often miscalculated by this narrative. The Simon’s Town Museum works with memorialisation in a way that contributes to “the externalisation of memory as evidence within judicial witnessing, as collective memory in truth commissions, and as heritage enshrined through memorials” (Blackmore, 2021, p. 265). This kind of heritage work is valuable in periods of transitional justice, and is particularly relevant in post-conflict societies such as South Africa. Memorialisation within museology contributes to reconciliation and justice efforts that work beyond the formalised frameworks of the judicial and policy systems, and Blackmore (2021) shows how the concept of “aesthetic justice [which] offer(s) artistic interventions as means to illuminate injustice, recalibrate justice norms” can form part of memorialisation work within heritage practices (Blackmore, 2021). She notes the following:

“What emerges is an uncovering of an ethics of justice whereby accountability, acknowledgment, performance, and memorial production serve to create agreements about wrongs in both abstract and collective ways, divorced from the individualising nature of court proceedings and formal justice mechanisms” (Blackmore, 2021, p. 289).

The Simon’s Town Museum thus stands as an institution that promotes this kind of critical heritage work, while simultaneously offering collaborative spaces with a broad community to redefinetheirrelationshipstospace,heritage,history,anddevelopment.This isanalternativepractice of development that is not confined to formalist agendas or policy briefs, as it crafts social value within history into the present and celebrates the power of people’s stories in crafting new meanings of belonging in democratic South Africa.

The museum and decoloniality

Museums, as institutions of knowledge production and cultural heritage curatorship, present the opportunity for a public engagement of collective historical knowledge. The Simon’s Town Museum through its exhibitions, activities and community work does exactly this, and goes further in its exhibitions by critically presenting the history of colonialism while simultaneously challenging the coloniality of knowledge production in museums. Coloniality can be felt throughout Simon’s Town in the British architecture and naval base infrastructure that remains, and in the apartheid system’s legacy of racially-based spatial development and inequality. This forms part of a “coloniality [which] permeates all aspects of social existence and gives rise to new social and geocultural identities” (Nkenkana, 2015). It is critical for museums to engage with this heritage of coloniality, which is both tangibleand intangible, bychallenging the“colonisation ofmemory,andthus people’s senses ofself” through decolonial curatorship and heritage practices (Lugones, 2010).

The Simon’s Town Museum has developed exhibitions and historical timelines in collaborative processes with historians, artists, community members, development practitioners, archaeologists and young descendants of forcibly removed Simonites. The Albert Thomas Oral History Project, embodied space-making in the Wag-n-Bietjie benches, community food markets and family-tree workshops emphasise a decolonising museology in how it challenges, constructs, and restores notions of knowledge, history, and heritage. This has created a collectively owned sense of heritage and history not just within the Museum, but throughout the town itself. Public space is reinterpreted from its colonial and apartheid history and becomes the arena in which social interactions and values reconstruct common heritage (Apaydin, 2020).

The public is invited to engage “in dialogue at the colonial difference” and so this heritagemaking is not fixed or strictly aligned to development agendas or a coloniality of knowledge and being but is constantly being reimagined by people in the town and in the Museum towards a lived experiencing of heritage (Lugones, 2010).

This is a form of resistance that is also creative in how the Museum redefines knowledge, curatorship, and community participation in the construction of a collective heritage of Simon’s Town. It is as much a resistance against forgetting the past, as well as a resistance of re-creation of knowledge and heritage for the future. This politics of resistances “shows the power of communities of the oppressed in constituting resistant meaning and each other” against the power of coloniality, and it is clear that this is the value of the Museum’s collaborative approach to its heritage practice (Lugones, 2010). The Museum ultimately shows “the potentiality for heritage making to be seen as a form of justice” that contributes to development, challenges coloniality of knowledge, and builds generative resistances that create new meanings of belonging to space (Blackmore, 2021). The Simon’s Town Museum is an institution that derives its value from the people and history that it honours, and thus shows the power of reimagining development from the perspective of critical heritage practices.

References

Apaydin, V. (2020). Introduction: Why Cultural Memory And Heritage? In: V. Apaydin, (ed.) Critical Perspectives On Cultural Memory And Heritage: Construction, Transformation And Destruction. London: UCL, pp. 1-10.

Apaydin, V. (2020). Heritage, Memory And Social Justice: Reclaiming Space And Identity. In: V. Apaydin, (ed.) Critical Perspectives On Cultural Memory And Heritage: Construction, Transformation And Destruction. London: UCL Press, pp. 84-97.

Baillie, B., Sørensen, M. L. S. (2021). Heritage Challenges In Africa: Contestations And Expectations. In: B. a. S. M. L. S. Baillie, (ed.) African Heritage Challenges: Communities And Sustainable Development. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (Globalisation, Urbanisation And Development In Africa), pp. 1-43.

Blackmore, K. (2021). Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice: The Case of Memorial Production in Uganda. In: B. a. S. M. L. S. Baillie, (ed.) African Heritage Challenges: Communities And Sustainable Development. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (Globalisation, Urbanisation And Development In Africa), pp. 265-296.

Haas, H. d., (2010). ‘Migration And Development: A Theoretical Perspective.’ International Migration Review, 44(1), pp. 227-264.

King, R., C. A. a. S. C., (2021). Transformation As Development: Southern Africa Perspectives On Capacity Building And Heritage. In: B. a. S. M. L. S. Baillie, (ed). African Heritage Challenges : Communities And Sustainable Development.. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (Globalisation, Urbanisation And Development In Africa), pp. 201231.

Lane, P. J., 2021. African Cultural Heritage And Economic Development: Dancing In The Forests OfTime. In:B.a. S.M. L.S.Baillie,(ed.) AfricanHeritageChallenges:Communities And Sustainable Development.. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (Globalisation, Urbanisation and Development in Africa), pp. 63-102.

Lugones, M. (2010). ‘Toward A Decolonial Feminism.’ Hypatia, 25(4), pp. 742-759.

Nkenkana, A. (2015). ‘No African Futures Without The Liberation Of Women: A Decolonial Feminist Perspective.’ Africa Development, XL(3), pp. 41-57.

Meinhof, N. G. S. a. U. H. (2011). ‘Singing A New Song? Transnational Migration, Methodological Nationalism And Cosmopolitan Perspectives.’ Music And Arts In Action, 3(3), pp. 21-39.

Mosse, D. (2013). ‘The Anthropology Of International Development.’ Annual Review Of Anthropology, Volume 42, pp. 227-246.

Ndoro, W. (2021). Heritage And/Or Development Which Way For Africa?. In: B. a. S. M. L. S. Baillie (ed.) African Heritage Challenges: Communities And Sustainable Development. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (Globalisation, Urbanisation And Development In Africa), pp. 103-124.

Schiller, G. N. and Meinhoff, H. U. (2011). ‘Singing a New Song? Transnational Migration, Methodological Nationalism And Cosmopolitan Perspectives.’ MusicAndArtsInAction, 3(3), pp. 21-39.

Simon's Town Museum, n.d. Albert Thomas Oral History Project. [Online] Available at: http://www.simonstownmuseum.org.za/project/read_single/PF-ccc2e4cb-7e75- 4a8e9a16-9281dd49e981. (Accessed 3 January 2022)

Simon's Town Museum, n.d. Descendants of Slavery. [Online] Available at: http://www.simonstownmuseum.org.za/project/read_single/PF-8a255715-3c29-464e91e7-c4024a3d653f. (Accessed: 30 December 2021)

Simon's Town Museum, n.d. The Makings Of A Community. [Online] Available at: http://www.simonstownmuseum.org.za/history/single_history/HF-0729904c-caa1-4afd9d71-6e76f8b9a8c9. (Accessed: 30 December 2021).

Western Cape Government, n.d. Department of Cultural Affairs & Sort. [Online] Available at: https://www.westerncape.gov.za/dept/cas. (Accessed 1 January 2022)

Decolonisation Therapy for Tears beyond the Icy Mountain in Northern Myanmar

By Seng Bu, Myanmar

“We don’t want the world heritage designation of Hkakabo Razi National Park!We don’t want WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society). We demand the law that recognises community-managed areas in our native land! This is the people’s demand!” (Saray, 2020)

Introduction

These radical claims echoing against the crystal white surface of the 19,320-foot tall, monumental Mount Hkakabo-Razi (Line, 1999) are the grievances, tears and anguished cries of the indigenous people living in the range of icy mountains area, Puta-o, at the Northernmost part in the tropical country, Myanmar. Puta-o is one of the districts in Kachin State, Myanmar and composed of five towns: Putao, Machanbaw, Naung Mon, Kong Lang Pu and Sumbrabum, where various ethnic tribes such as Rawang, Lisu, Khanti Shan, Jinghpaw, and a few others are residing (Aung Tun, 1998). Shifting cultivation and farming, hunting, finding herbal plants and medicines are how indigenous and local people survive in the 11,280km2 forested area of Puta-O (Fishbein, 2020). Poor transportation and infrastructure have historically hampered socio-economic and health access (Saray, 2020)

In order to write about a community proposing cultural and ecological transitions, I searched exhaustively for various examples of alternative ecological conservation happening in Kachin State, Myanmar, which is close to my heart. Unsurprisingly, it was challenging to find published academic papers in English and Burmese that discuss the ecological transitions in Myanmar, particularly within the Kachin State. This illustrates the inequality in knowledge generation, production, distribution, and consumption which ends up as knowledge erasure (Icaza, 2021). This is a “coloniality” (Quijano, 2000) that is so systematically institutionalised that I needed to review various projects and transformation examples that are happening at the grass-roots level in Myanmar through local civil society organisations' websites, rather than through the university’s library.

I have engaged with critical theories and concepts that have urged me to unlearn what I have learned so far through social constructions and normative, stereotypical understandings and to relearn the other side of mainstream development narratives, through contemplating the testimonies of local Myanmar people in the documentary, TearsBeyondtheIcyMountain, and drawing from Rabinowitz’s paper The Price of Salt (Rabinowitz, 2000; Saray, 2020). It is heart-wrenching to witness indigenous peoples standing firmly to protect their lands and habitats at the cost of their lives.

A series of demonstrations at Puta-O in 2018 was led by Rawang indigenous people together with other local communities and thousands of protestors, following the potential UNESCO World Heritage Nomination to the Hkakabo-Razi and Hponkan-Razi protected areas, which would extend 4,778km2 to the southern part, where estimated 4000 people are living (Fishbein, 2020). Despite evidence that we are in imminent danger of mass extinction and apocalyptic environmental distress, which characterises life in the Anthropocene era (Sterner et al., 2019), these groups are against this conservation project. Why are these indigenous people resisting the conservation plans proposed by the powerful state institutions, the Myanmar government, giant non-governmental organisations Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and a United Nations agency, UNESCO? Why do they fearlessly propose alternative community-managed conservation plans against such orthodox ones? In order to begin answering these questions, I will structure this paper in four themes, namely the import

of hegemonic conservation in Northern Myanmar, debunking the “Do-No-Harm” principle, the evolutionary process of development discourse, and linkages to degrowth.

Theme 1: Import of hegemonic conservation in northern Myanmar

Since the early to late 1990s, the modern Indiana Jones, Dr Alan Rabinowitz, then WCS’s Director of Science for Asia (Line, 1999), did exploration trips with Myanmar's Department of Forestry with the purpose of conducting biological surveys and recommending specific areas for protection in the hidden mountains and forests in the northernmost tip of Myanmar, also known as “the most forbidding terrain on Earth” (Frank Kingdon-Ward, quoted in Rabinowitz, 2000). It was little known that the very first Western, scientist-led team exploration to the region were mainly composed of the questions to the locals' daily expenses without clear explanations on the questionnaires and the ethical, informed consents, yet with bundles of verbal incentives given to the locals which turned out to be broken promises.

“They said they would build a large warehouse to store farmed items so that basic staples likerice,saltandoilwouldbeavailablecheaply…….Buttheynevertookayesornosurvey, didn't ask if we liked it or not. That's how they created this national park.” Mvyit Dee, Bangnamdim town (Saray, 2020).

“They even took the statistics on how many uniforms, pencils, books a student would need. Howmanycookingoil dowe use yearly?Theyevenhadthe girlscalculatethemoneythey'd need for cosmetics yearly…They even asked the amount we need to buy new underwear eachyear.Theysaidit'sa goodorganisationthat canhelpus.So,we kept waitingpatiently.”

Zame Khawdang, Longna area (ibid.).

Moreover, it seems the perception of the locals' ways of living by Rabinowitz, a bioconservation pioneer, was severely limited. He condemned the locals as willingly trading the body of the animals for basic needs such as clothing, food, and salt (Rabinowitz, 2000). It was not clearwhy he did not mention theroot causes ofthe country'spolitical instability. Myanmar in the post-colonial period has pushed millions into an extreme poverty trap with a lack of access to health, education, and other fundamental needs (Nikoloski, McGuire and Mossialos, 2021). Locals have to travel on foot along slippery and dangerous terrains for a couple of weeks to get food staples such as rice and salt, and many of them injured themselves by doing so (Saray, 2020).

Perhaps, to make sense of such different understandings, one must live like the locals and encompass the ontology and epistemology of why they do what they do for their own cosmological ways of living (Escobar, 2016). Reflections and discussions from a distance will give us the silhouette, not the reality. Mohanty argues that to reconstruct a society that is inclusive and does not leave anyone behind, we will have to approach social (in)justice issues through the lens of marginalised communities, because looking with privileged eyes will create a blind spot to those who have not (Mohanty, 2003).

Theme 2: Debunking the "Do-No-Harm" principle

The pure intentions for natural conservation with the romanticised and neo-liberal practices of Rabinowitz and WCS project have caused more harm to the locals than the expected and envisioned benefits. The Rawang people claim to have lived thousands of years in the region, even with the Tibetan people on the other side, where they lived as close-knitted groups and took care of animals and natural resources with ownership before the arrival of Rabinowitz and WCS (Saray, 2020). They assert that the mental trauma they have endured because of the consequences of hegemonic wildlife conservation will not be healed for generations (ibid.).

“We no longer dared to travel alone or in pair when we needed to go buy salt and tea. Even we bring nothing only just clothes that we are wearing. They would sometimes do body search. They even reached inside our clothes grope body parts. So, people are so scared."

DSHN.Eliyah, Dazong area (Saray, 2020).

“In 2015, I dug up herbal roots and sold them because I needed money to send my kids to school. A forestry officer said the officials were searching the villagers at posts and he took my money. He never returned the money. My kids crossed the border to work since they could no longer go to school” ZBL.Deeram, Arumdam (Krong) area (ibid.).

This dehumanisation faced by locals has revealed that the one-size-fits-all approach to development is dangerous, particularly as we live in messy and complex power dynamics (Scooneset al.,2018).It wouldbewrongto singleout themetastasisofracialiseddevelopment in micro and meso levels alone, thus demarcating the boundaries of progressiveness and backwardness. At the macro level, the coupling of development and growth has been stated powerfullybyUnitedNationsin1987in"OurCommonFuture", alsoknownastheBrundtland report (UN Secretary-General, 1987). Furthermore, the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15 (United Nations, 2016) regarding life on land was driven by mainstream conservation discourse, and gave almost no space for local communities to exercise their autonomy and participation in decision-making about the habitat of which they are the guardians (United Nations, 2016; Krauss, 2019).

In such a scenario, I question whose conservation and development are we aspiring to? To address this, I recall the “white gaze”, which can be traced back to colonisation and slavery by racialising white/European societies as an upper-class human race and the rest as inferior ‘others’, creating us and them (Harcourt, 2021). In development discourse, this constructs harmful hierarchies as racialisation undermines the existing knowledge of the local community (ibid).

Theme 3: evolutionary process of development discourse

I posit that historicising is critical, not in order to blame and shame the people and institutions that have caused such mistakes, but in order to apprehend the generational sufferings of people, learn from past failures, and reshape society in harmony as we want to live. On closer inspection of the accumulative tragedies that locals have faced, one can undeniably highlight the Myanmar state’s intention to control the “areas of limited statehood” in Northern Myanmar, behind the agenda of eco-conservative development (Borzel and Risse, 2010).

“The central government rarely administered us. They govern only on paper.” Sanlu Eliyah, Dazong area (Saray, 2020).

While it tends to be true that “areas of limited statehood” have granted selfdetermination and autonomy, I question the possibility of healing the environmental damages in isolation (Borzel and Risse, 2010, p.119). Additionally, when it comes to human-caused environmental catastrophes and their consequences on people's health, such spatial splits and physical territorialisation do not seem to be effective. Because it would be impossible to command the polluted air in China not to cross the boundaries into Myanmar or vis-à-vis.

Ontheonehand,criticsshouldnotfailtorecognisethecontinuityofchangesinscience and so too in development discourse. On the other hand, one may question the dialectics of sustainability and growth. Jackson has argued that it might be one of the most challenging conundrums for experts to discern eventually the compatibility of sustainability and growth, specifically in envisioning effective climate strategies (Gerber, 2020). The next question

would be to determine the pragmatic steps for transforming towards sustainable ecologies and cultures that dignify all human and non-human actors and an economy that decouples from the fairy tales of growth (Khanna et. al., 2020).

Theme 4: linkages with degrowth

When I first learnt about "growth", I recalled a scene within the novel, “The Little Prince” about baobab trees that infested soils, occupied the whole planet, and would never be able to be uprooted if intervention came too late (Saint-Exupéry, 2011, p.28). The instrumentalisation of growth has been geo-political, from West to East and North to South, in order to provide the myopic, quick-fix solutions for socio-economic needs without transparency of its pitfalls (Gerber and Raina, 2018; Gerber, 2020). However, the bright side is that there is a second chance if we act with urgency on the ecological destructions. To take action, we must go “beyond growth, post-growth” by embracing the plurality with the substantivists, and not holding the universality with the formalists (Gerber and Raina, 2018, p.353). While researchers and scientists have contested four significant waves of post-growth, degrowth, agrowth, steady-state economics and post-development, I will expand the concept of "degrowth" in relation to the Rawang indigenous community from Myanmar (ibid., p.353). Gerber has introduced "degrowth" by explaining its genealogy, demystifying the term, and linking it to agrarian studies (Gerber, 2020). Gerber elaborates that degrowth should not be understood as a way of going back in time, yet it brings us back to what it means to be human, to reconnect ourselves, to uncover our ego-centred, blinded eyes to see the beauty in smallthings,toshare,tocare,tohealandtoliveinsimplicityandcommunality(Gerber,2020). However, Idepartfrom Gerber's argument that“degrowth is still largely todaya whitemiddleclass movement of the global North” (Gerber, 2020, p.238), as the progressive green values and voluntary frugality has been the blueprint for indigenous communities like those in Northern Myanmar (Saray, 2020). Some of them may not comprehend what degrowth means academically, but he practices of it are ingrained in their daily lives (ibid).

Conclusion

I problematise that an ecological transition and transformation without a shift in ontological and epistemological conceptualisations will not bridge us to where we want to be. Decolonisation is a point of departure to shift development discourse from rehabilitation to structural change in pursuing sustainability. Besides, to understand the development process as it is highly skewed by political economy, the decolonial perspective is the only possible way to evaluate modernity as a totalising project (Icaza, 2021). Therefore, taking a step back and thinking collectively it is probably wise not to beentrappedin asystem constantlypushing us towards growth. Although the Rawang community is demanding for “organisations-freezone”, they also envisage technological support through institutions (ibid.), thus amplifying Jonathan Rigg's “big D and little D” assertion on the developmental process of Southeast Asia (Lewis, 2019; Fishbein, 2020). On top of that, the locals' dream of self-sustaining and nonprofiteering eco-tourism (Saray, 2020) offers a potential project similar to the example of community-based tourism in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, in which the indigenous community adapts their culture of solidarity to support living and protecting them from migration and economic refugee (Pineda, n.d.). With the combination of these factors, one may argue that the balance of “big D and little D” is needed more than ever to achieve these alternative conservation solutions for a conflict-ridden country like Myanmar (Lewis, 2019). In this regard of transformation, one should be mindful of the nonlinear process of finding all possible solutions and discarding the status quo of foreign aid dependency in conservation

efforts which appear to reinvent colonialism. I propose amalgamation is a key, and we must treat divisions as a contagious disease and take actions on the intranational, transnational and international collaborative strategies to rejuvenate human lives alongside the forests, rivers, and oceans.

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APolitico-Ecological Interrogation of Class-basedAnalyses of Green Grabbing

By Inés Jiménez Rodríguez, Spain

Introduction

This discussion is based on a previous essay which analysed green grabbing in Tanzania through a class-based approach - better known as Agrarian Political Economy (APE). While there is a slight thematic overlap with said previous essay, this essay provides a different perspective, and therefore emphasises different features within the phenomenon of green grabbing. Inthisessay,IinterrogateAPE’sanalysisofgreengrabbingfromaPoliticalEcology approach. I argue that Political Ecology evidences and provides solutions to some crucial shortcomings of class-based analysis: namely, by emphasising the causality of the non-human world in shaping agrarian transformations, as well as by proposing a closer engagement with ‘lived environments’, as sites of socio-environmental relations that encompass more than material (re)production.

The discussion benefits from including specific examples. For the sake of clarity and coherence, all examples used in this essay draw from instances of green grabbing in Tanzania: for example, it refers to community-based conservation in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area or to the development of green economy projects such as the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). These cases have been included for illustrative purposes, and I refrain from going into excessive detail regarding their specificities so as to not divert us from the aim of the essay: i.e. a political-ecological interrogation of class-bases analyses of green grabbing.

The essay starts with a brief evaluation of the Agrarian Political Economy (APE) approach and the Political Ecology Approach in order to demonstrate their complementarity in analysing contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism. The following discussion is structured in two basic sections. The first section engages in a broad discussion of how these theoretical traditions would conceptualise and interpret green grabbing. Special attention is given to a political-ecological reading of the Agrarian Question - as this concept is understood to comprise the main dynamic of agrarian transformation engendered by green grabbing. The following section uses Political Ecology to expand our analyses of green grabbing, featuring phenoena that APE has hitherto neglected or been incapable of analysing properly - related to state-society relations, conflict, and resistance.

The theoretical traditions

The class-based approach, also known as (Marxist) Agrarian Political Economy (APE), is a tradition concerned with elucidating the asymmetrical and consequential import of rural class differentiation. ‘Class’ signifies a social relationship that differentiates people accordingly to their relation to the means of production, whereby they are “compelled to engage in the same activities if they want to make the best use of their endowments (i.e., tangible property, intangible skills, and cultural traits)” (Elster, 1985, p. 331). Class-based analysis provides a disaggregating lens into agrarian phenomena, investigating how the differentiated inclusion/exclusion from processes of production and reproduction shape and stratify rural societies (Herring and Agarwala, 2016). It is also concerned with (historical and contemporary) processes of change in agrarian societies and, relatedly, engages with the notion of agency as something bounded within class-determined structures of freedoms, interests, and constraints (Herring and Agarwala, 2016).

Many describe a decline (Herring and Agarwala, 2006) or impasse (Levien et al, 2018) in class analysis over recent decades. Some ‘endogenous’ reasons behind this impasse derive from the hyper-structuralist analysis hitherto characterising Orthodox Marxism, as a universalising framework (a) grounded on a teleological understanding of agrarian change, as an evolution in the modes of production, and (b) tending to dismiss or understate peasant agency and non-class forms of oppression (Levien et al 2018). On the other hand, this impasse also derives from the empirical challenges of contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism. This refers to inter alia, the fragmentation of the classes of labour: leading to (a) the emergence of scarce, precarious, and irregular forms of waged employment (characterised by pluriactivity, plurilocality, semi-proletarianisation); and (b) to the increasingly causal intersections between class formation processes and relations of gender, race, caste (Levien et al, 2018). This has created challenging new patterns in agrarian class formation and classbased mobilisation, to which APE has sought to adapt.

In this context, APE is experiencing a new momentum in trying to grasp contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism (Herring and Agarwala, 2006; Levien et al, 2018). Notably, recent years have seen a proliferation of class-centred analyses in response to the neoliberal transformation(andacceleration)ofcapitalism’s metabolicrift9,which has widened the contradictions between the global economy and the global environment. This is the root cause of several of the crises supposedly amended through green grabbing including food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and climate change (Taylor, 2015; Bergius et al, 2020). ‘Green grabbing’ entails the appropriation and dispossession of control over the means of production, legitimised through narratives of environmental protection, green growth, or sustainable agriculture and development (Green and Adams, 2015). Contemporary green grabbing is therefore embedded in a broader capitalist conjunction, whereby strategies of capital accumulation (and their rush to capture resources) are competing and overlapping with each other in their response to the converging crises of the metabolic rift (Taylor, 2015).

In this context, political ecology helps us evaluate the extent to which class-based analysis remains a relevant and effective research programme. The commonalities between these traditions are well noted. In the years following the publication of Blaikie and Brookfield’s seminal piece, Land Degradation and Society (1987), political ecology drew significantly from the Marxist tradition in positing its fundamental premise: that changes in the relations between nature and society are driven by the socio-environmental contradictions derived from capital accumulation, which materialise in the form of resource degradation and conflict in local rural societies (Robbins, 2012). Thus, political ecology stems from a similar ontology and empirical concerns as APE. However, and particularly during recent decades, this tradition has undergone some significant renovations. These have arguably distanced Political Ecology from the more ‘classic’ premises of class-based analysis - yet at the same time, they have also proven the combination of these two theoretical traditions to be increasingly important.

Similar to APE, political ecology underwent a significant period of change since the 2000s (Jones, 2008; Rocheleau, 2007). This ‘second generation’ Political Ecology has progressively shifted away from unilinear and structural forms of explanations like those characterising Orthodox Marxism as aforementioned, in favour of more post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and post-colonial approaches (Jones, 2008; Blaser and Escobar, 2016). New

9 i.e. the inherent rupture between nature and a developing capitalist society, as capital demands the dislocation of production from nature’s biophysical cycles of regeneration, thus leading to an eventual ecological crisis (Taylor, 2015).

features include a higher attention to grassroots and peasant agencies, as well as an expanded understanding of the arenas where power relations can unfurl (Jones, 2008). Particularly in its ‘third generation’, political eecology is also becoming increasingly attentive to the world’s diversity of understandings, meanings, and relations with nature - which is thus understood as more than an objective biophysical reality (Blaser and Escobar, 2016). This contrasts with the epistemological realism typically employed by APE (Levien et. al., 2018). As will be seen throughout the following discussion, these recent developments within political ecology will be extremely useful in evidencing and amending some of the aforementioned impasses in class-based analysis.

The implications of green grabbing with regards to the agrarian question

Before delving further into the issue, we need to first understand how the employed theoretical approaches would conceptualise and problematise green grabbing: what specific features and continuitiesdotheypayattentionto?What aretheirobservedimplicationsofthephenomenon, and the importance attributed to them?

From an APE viewpoint, green grabbing can be understood within the agrarian question, which studies: the encroachment of capitalism onto the rural world, its reconfiguration of the access and control over the means of production, and its resultant transformation of peasant societies “making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones” (Kautsky, cited in Taylor, 2015, p. 108). These processes result in the social differentiation of a hitherto undifferentiated peasantry, now divided into rural classes according to their differential capacity to integrate in capitalist circuits of agricultural production (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009). Social differentiation would expectedly engender an increasingly polarised division between a rural proletariat and an agrarian bourgeoisie (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009).

In Tanzania, and within the broader context of the neoliberal reconfiguration of agrarian capitalism, many authors are observing the transformation of a rural society hitherto characterised by small-scale pastoralism and farming, as well as by abundant land (Greco, 2015). This transformation was driven by the differentiated impact of several processes and avenues of accumulation, which have enabled the consolidation of neoliberal agrarian capitalism in Tanzania: some pre-existing, and now reinforced (like land privatisation and enclosure, and imposed villagisation and settlement); and others introduced through current (green)resourcegrabs (such as ‘community-based’neoliberal conservation, andtheexpansion of irrigated cultivation within agricultural supply chains) (McCabe et. al, 2010; Bergius et. al. 2017). Green grabbing is thus situated within this broader process of agrarian transformation and resource grabbing.

Across Tanzania’s peasant and indigenous societies, this has often jeopardised - and in some cases, led to the actual dissolution of - local livelihood systems, as well as their constitutive institutions of production, reciprocity, and socio-political organisation (Butt, 2012; Green and Adams, 2015). In this context, poorer peasants and pastoralists lost access to the means of production and have often adapted through a partial proletarianisation, engaging in various configurations of pluriactivity and plurilocality that include self-subsistence cultivation, petty trade, and waged labour (McCabe et al , 1992; Greco, 2015). Conversely, a select minority was able to successfully integrate into recent resource grabs: in the case of green grabs, as conservation officials or commercial out-growers within sustainableagriculture schemes; in the case of general resource grabs, through their engagement with irrigated cultivation and intensive livestock farming (Bergius et. al., 2020). The richer segments have sometimes hired poorer pastoralists as herders and moved to urban centres while maintaining their rural property through waged labour (McCabe et al , 1992).

This presents a generalised picture of the social differentiation processes engendered by green grabbing, and within the broader context of neoliberal agrarian capitalism in rural Tanzania. Nevertheless, and as I discuss below, these processes of agrarian transformation havealso unfurledthrougha series ofspatial andsocio-environmentalinterconnections, which have been missed through this class-based analysis.

Green grabbing through a political-ecological reading of the agrarian question

Political ecology elucidates the oversights or actual shortcomings of the APE approach. Foremost, this refers to a political-ecological critique of the understanding of the Agrarian Question hitherto presented by APE, as well as its application in the case of green grabbing. Taylor’s (2015) critique of the Agrarian Question makes a crucial point in noting its hitherto lacking engagement with the surrounding environment. APE generally assumes a clean dichotomy between nature and society, whereby the rural landscape is a mere setting onto which politico-economic phenomena unfold (Taylor, 2015; Robbins, 2012). Relatedly, the drivers of agrarian transformation identified within the Agrarian Question remain primarily Anthropocenic: they reference, namely, changes in the access and control over the means of production, as well as in the relations of capital and labour (Taylor, 2015; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009).

A political-ecological reading of the Agrarian Question does not require any fundamental change in the premises of this concept, but an expansion of its scope. It proposes, foremost, to emphasise the causality of the non-human world in shaping agrarian transformations. This stems from an acknowledgement that rural societies are embedded in their relations with the surrounding biophysical system, local nature, and non-human actors (Herring and Agarwala, 2016). This is easily fitted within premises of the Agrarian Question: indeed, an ‘ecological agrarian question’ is increasingly recognised in the current APE literature, drawing from these same arguments (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010). Taking it further, our re-reading also proposes a closer engagement with “lived environments as active sites of socio-ecological production” (Taylor, 2015, p. 114). This references a more socioecologically grounded understanding of people’s identities, interests, and behaviour patterns: whereby these are defined not only by the material or biophysical circumstances of (re)production, but also by contingencies of space and place, related to the everyday practices and relations whereby people engage with nature, perform their identities, and reproduce themselves (Butt, 2012). This draws from second- and third-generation Political Ecology.

It is due to similar considerations that Gadgil and Guda (1995) created their typology of socio-ecological classes, which distinguishes between: omnivores, ecosystem people, and ecological refugees. While maintaining APE’s focus on social differentiation through changes in material (re)production, this typology also considers transformations in the meaning-laden human interactions with the ecologies of their particular localities (Butt, 2012). In short, it considers the socio-ecological mechanisms of social differentiation whereby people are uprooted or displaced from their particular socionatures. These socionatures signify the material and cultural constructions that ground one’s belonging to a location, reproduced through everyday interactions and co-dependencies between human and non-human actors (Butt, 2012). This political-ecologic reconceptualisation can contribute a better picture of the Agrarian Question and green grabbing in Tanzania.

Ecosystem people are generally prevalent before green grabbing, and perhaps closer to the APE’s idea of the middle peasant. The concept comprises those whose livelihoods are embedded in the surrounding environment, and their material needs dependent on the natural resources of their own locality (Gadgil and Guha, 1995; Meher, 2011). In Tanzania, many

remain on the land between protected areas, or try to sustain their livelihood within them (as part of community-based conservation programmes) (Mariki et. al., 2014). This class has not been/is yet to be displaced from their socionatures. However, their relations and perception of the surrounding ecologies have increasingly been transformed through the encroachment of green grabbing processes, in a sort of ‘epistemological’ displacement that ultimately translates into material transformations. This is not always imposed on the affected population, but strategically adopted and adapted by them, in accordance to their interests. Following the establishment of (community-based) wildlife management areas across rural Tanzania, involved communities have often internalised a commodified view of their surrounding nature (Green and Adam, 2015). In order to secure rents, the surrounding ecologies are re-interpreted as conservation and wildlife resources, property of village elders or those with a formal title to the pertinent land (Green and Adam, 2015). The omnivore class comprises those successfully integrated into the resource grabs following this transformation - as well as the elites, urban and rural populations benefiting from the goods and services that derive from resource grabs (Gadgil and Guha, 1995).

The ecological refugees class comprises those displaced and dispossessed by resource grabs (Gadgil and Guha, 1995). In Tanzania, ecological refugees are a rapidly growing class, formed by the small-scale cultivators and pastoralists that have been marginalised and dispossessed by the convergence of green grabbing with other processes of accumulation and dispossession,suchascapitalist-agriculturalexpansion(Marikietal ,2014; GreenandAdams, 2015). Compared to the expected proletariat, the concept of ecological refugees is perhaps more illustrative of contemporary rural capitalism, which has generally failed to create a polarised class structure as expected by traditional APE (Herring and Agarwala, 2016). Green grabbing rarely creates wage labour opportunities, nor are the dispossessed populations easily absorbed in a neoliberal economy that generally prioritises growth over livelihoods (Weldemichel, 2021). Ecological refugees are generally ‘caught in the middle’ of shifting modes of production and property, in ways that severely constrain their reproduction: their access to the natural world for self-subsistence has drastically diminished, yet the capitalist system has failed to integrate them enough to ensure their dependency on market relations and waged foods - commodities they generally cannot afford (Gadgil and Guha, 1995; Meher, 2011).

In the context of resource grabs and neoliberal environmental governance, Tanzania’s ecological refugees comprise those populations most affected by the weakened authority of local agrarian institutions, which generally based the governance of the commons on which their livelihoods depended (Kisoza, 2007). This is the case, most notable, of the Maasai pastoralists across Ngorongoro and Serengeti (Green and Adams, 2015). Uprooted from their localities, their reproduction is conditioned on self-exploitation, pluriactivity when possible, and migration (Greco, 2015; Green and Adams, 2015). Community insider/outsider dynamics mean that ecological refugees are not always integrated in the socio-environmental relations, institutions, and reciprocities basing their ‘host’ socionatures; furthermore, their displacement has significant spillover effects in the surrounding areas, as local ecosystems now deal with the added pressure of reproducing displaced populations (Mariki et. al., 2014). This has led to the augmentation of land conflict, land degradation, and human-wildlife conflict - particularly against elephant populations (Butt, 2012 Mariki et. al., 2014). Their displacement is often associated with material processes of accumulation by dispossession, such as evictions or the prolonged effect of economic marginalisation (such as dispossession by the market) (Weldemichel, 2021). However, social differentiation also stems from politically-laden contradictions between different discourses and interpretations of their relations with the surrounding nature, which legitimise the interventions and transformation of local socionatures (Robbins, 2012; Bergius et. al.2017). This further demonstrates the explicitly ecological side of agrarian transformations bolstered by green grabbing.

Ecological refugees have often been directly evicted from conservation areas, as conservation stakeholders interpret their livelihoods as environmentally irresponsible, or unfitting with Tanzania’s plan for a modernised, green agricultural sector (Mariki et. al., 2014). These narratives have been employed in recent green growth initiatives, such as the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), which led to the violent eviction of 5,000 pastoralists and small-scale farmers out of the Kilombero Valley in 2012 (Mariki et al, 2014). In other instances, and particularly in so-called community-based conservation projects, peasants have been forced out due to the prolonged effect of economic marginalisation and lack of viable livelihoods (Weldemichel, 2021). In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Northeastern Tanzania), Maasai pastoralists have been economically pressured to relocate themselves due to increasingly stringent conservation-related restrictions on cultivation and pastoralism: indeed, the ‘community’ aspect has often been trumped by the interests of conservation agencies and (Western) safari tourists, who demand ‘pristine environments’ completely isolated from human contact (Weldemichel, 2021).

Hitherto, we have interrogated the APE approach through a political-ecological readingoftheAgrarianQuestion.Thishasimprovedourunderstandingofthegeneraldynamic whereby green grabbing transforms the affected agrarian societies. The following chapter expands this political-ecological interrogation of APE, discussing the processes of dispossession, accumulation, and resistance that enable the materialisation of contemporary green grabs. In doing so, we can also elucidate and ‘amend’ more of APE’s shortcomings, largely derived from (a) its inability to conceptualise nature-society relations outside of issues of (re)production, and (b) its lacking attention to everyday practices and positionalities.

Struggles, and resistances related to green grabbing, within the state-society context

As we delve deeper into our interrogation of APE, we must start with a brief discussion of how state-society relations are conceptualised by these traditions. This will provide a necessary foundation for the following discussion.

Political ecology’s basic understanding of state-society relations does not diverge significantly from its Marxist roots. Both traditions have progressively departed from simplification of the state as a ‘black box’ of capital accumulation, for instance simply the enabler of dominant class interests within processes of capital accumulation (Byres, 1995). In seeking a more nuanced approach, both traditions have favoured more relational approaches to the state-society. With regards to green grabbing, it is acknowledged that the control over natural resources is claimed and contested through a multi-scalar, polycentric web of relations - comprising “customary, state leveraging, and market strategies of land access” (Pallotti and Tornimbeni, 2016, p. 7; Greco 2015).

This is a necessary adaptation to the contemporary processes of green grabbing. In Tanzania, the appropriation of land for conservation has been majorly driven by state authorities, international conservation organisations and, to a smaller extent, private companies (Mariki et. al., 2015). However, and following the expansion of community-based conservation since the 1980s (with generally questionable results regarding actual community engagement), local actors have become a causal force in shaping resource grabs once they materialise on the ground - be it through their resistance, acquiescence, or active endorsement (wanting to be integrated on their own terms) (Green and Adams, 2015). Furthermore - and as structural adjustment led to the decentralisation of natural resource control, and thus the de jure devolution of authority over natural resources to villages and local institutions - green grabbing has necessarily unfurled in the fluid and customary norms of land access demarcated by agrarian communities (Pallotti and Tornimbeni, 2016; Pedersen, 2016). Combinedly, these

dynamics have led to a conflictive state-market-society arena, whereby the actual materialisation of green grabbing is highly contingent.

This demonstrates a less deterministic analysis of green grabbing. Furthermore, recent ‘generations’ within political ecology enable an even more nuanced interrogation of APE’s approach to state-society relations and green grabbing. Foremost, this is thanks to the tradition’s new emphasis on the socio-ecological constitution of state-society relations, with the state reconceptualised as a constellation of socio-environmental relations, processes, and practices (Angel and Loftus, 2019; Loftus, 2020). State-society relations are understood as causal in the ‘creation’ of nature: referring not only to actual transformations of the surrounding environment, but also changes in the perception of nature and socio-ecological relations by the involved groups (Loftus, 2020). Furthermore, state-society relations are also causal in the creation of ‘environmental’ subjects: according to PE’s ‘Environmental Subjects and Identity’ thesis, relations with the surrounding environment (including habitational, cultural, and livelihoodrelations)areconstitutiveofpeoples’political identities and behaviour (Robbins, 2012).

This understanding of state-society relations was implicitly employed in the previous chapter, as we discussed the socio-environmental mechanisms of social differentiation that were adopted, adapted, or contested through this polycentric state-market-society arena. This included the interiorisation of a commodified understanding of wildlife by some community members, the imposed distinction between ‘pristine natures’ and ‘human natures’, as well as from categorisations of ‘appropriate’ relations with the surrounding environment, which generally vilify small-scale farming and pastoralism (Robbins, 2012; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017). The discursive frames comprised in these processes, as well as their realisation through evictions, enclosures, and other mechanisms of dispossession, have unfurled through state-society relations (Butt, 2012; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017).

This re-conceptualisation of state-society relations is also necessary for our analysis of conflict and resistance related to green grabbing. In Tanzania, and to the best of my knowledge, organised resistance to green grabbing has been rare; even rarer has been the success of such mobilisations, or their expression of a specifically class-based consciousness (Benjaminsen et al , 2013). While this can be associated with the risk-avoidant behaviour oftenattributedtopeasants,itshouldnotbeconfoundedwithpassivity.Therearemyriadnoted instances of resistance to the dispossession and marginalisation enacted by state officials and green-grab stakeholders in Tanzania. However, they have generally taken the form of ‘weapons of the weak’: strategies that avoid and/or contest the oppressor without their direct confrontation, through techniques such as “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on” (Scott, cited in Mariki et. al., 2015, p. 21).

The lack of an overt class component severely limits APE’s capacity to evaluate these instances of resistance. Conversely, the political-ecologic reading of social differentiation and the Agrarian Question does allow some significant insights. Indeed, relations and perceptions of the surrounding nature, as well as perceptions of inequality within nature-society relations, have often been made more explicit (Butt, 2012; Benjaminsen et. al., 2013). Notably, elephant killings and guerrilla agriculture (i.e., cultivation in zones demarcated exclusively for nonhuman life) are two of the most common exercises of resistance against green grabbing in Tanzania (Butt, 2012; Mariki et. al., 2015; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017). They can be easily associated with resistance over current conditions of (re)production, such as elephant killings as an engagement with alternative (illegal) livelihood opportunities, such as ivory trading, and guerrilla agriculture as a survival strategy to the reproductive crisis engendered

by green grabbing. Alternatively, and through an analysis of their hidden transcripts10, several authors have understood these instances to also comprise a re-assertion of people’s position and ancestral rootswithinthesocionatures they are being displaced from (Mariki et. al., 2015).

Thus, the identified interests of these socio-environmental classes concern not only people's livelihoods, but the socio-environmental relations and place on which these livelihoods were embedded, and which are constitutive of their identity (Butt, 2012; Robbins, 2012). Local peoplesmay continuehuntingandcultivating in enclosedareas in orderto defend theirancestral, customary, human,and propertyrights, andto implicitly invalidatethechanges in control affected by green grabbing (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017).

Sometimes, these forms of resistance also contest the ‘enfranchisement’ of non-human life – for example elephants, which are highly protected despite the dangers and damages they entail to local producers - in comparison to the marginalisation of ecological refugees (Mariki et. al., 2015).

Conclusion

Agrarian Political Economy is arguably experiencing some serious analytical shortcomings in itsattemptedanalysisofcontemporarydevelopmentsinglobalagrariancapitalism.Here,these shortcomings were most evident as we discussed the spatial and socio-environmental interconnections through which contemporary green grabbing unfurls. The essay has demonstrated the utility of a political-ecologic interrogation of APE’s basic analytical premises. This has allowed me to identify and provide solutions to some crucial shortcomings of class-based analysis in its evaluation of green grabbing.

This interrogation has paid special emphasis to a political-ecological reading of the agrarian question, as this concept is understood to comprise the main dynamic of agrarian transformation engendered by green grabbing. Through this re-reading, we have emphasised thecausality ofthe non-humanworld in shaping agrarian transformations, as well as thesocioecological mechanisms of social differentiation whereby people are uprooted or displaced from their particular socionatures. When applied to Tanzania, this has provided a more accurate understanding of the processes of agrarian transformation that have been engendered by green grabbing. As discussed, the formation of the socio-environmental classes responded not only to transformations in the material conditions of (re)production, but also to politicallyladen contradictions between different discourses and interpretations of nature-society relations.

The above discussion posited that state-society relations, and the state itself, are constituted through a constellation of socio-environmental processes, practices, and contestations. This provided some added nuance to our understanding of the processes of social differentiation and accumulation by dispossession that were discussed in the previous chapter. Furthermore, it enabled a better understanding of rural agencies and instances of conflict and resistance to green grabbing. The discussion of socio-environmentally motivated weapons of the weak enabled a more accurate understanding of the interests and rationalisations that base the resistance of classes affected by green grabbing.

10 “...the narratives that subaltern groups use to interpret their own experience of domination or oppression” (Mariki et. al., 2014).

References

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Gadgil, M. and Guha, R. (2013) Ecology and equity: The use and abuse of nature in contemporary India. Milton Park: Routledge. Greco, E. (2015) ‘Landlords in the making: class dynamics of the land grab in Mbarali, Tanzania’. Review of African Political Economy, 42(144), pp.225-244.

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Weldemichel, T. G. (2021) ‘Making land grabbable: Stealthy dispossessions by conservation in Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania’ . Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 25148486211052860.

‘Paper and Glue’:AnAlternative to Mainstream Development

By Marta Richero, Italy

Introduction

Development has contributed to the increase of those challenges that we have to deal with today, such as climate change, economic globalisation, poverty, and inequality. Indeed, the dominant discourses and practices of development have excluded the knowledge, the voices, and the real problems of those countries of the Global South (Asia, Africa, and Latin America) that, paradoxically, it should have helped to develop (Escobar, 2007). Therefore, mainstream development - understood as those theories and practices promoted by the West to impose and maintain a political, economic, and cultural dominance over the “Third World” (Escobar, 1995) - can't be an option anymore. We have to unmake and remake this concept by looking at new narratives, new ways of thinking and doing (Escobar, 1995 and Escobar, 2008 quoted in Harcourt, 2019, pp. 247-248). We need to find new strategies to establish alternatives to development that can guide us to a systemic transformation. Indeed, many of these alternatives are already put into practice by movements, activists, intellectuals, and, I would add, artists (Escobar, 2007).

In the next paragraphs, I’m going to analyse the work of the artist JR and some of his most famous projects. First, bringing the example of the “Women Are Heroes” project, I will show why, in my opinion, we can consider JR’s way of thinking and working as an alternative to mainstream development (1). I will then focus on the groundbreaking Inside Out Project as a form of storytelling and a practice of body politics (2). To conclude, and in reference to the “Face2Face” project, I will also reflect on the role of art as means of transformation (3).

Thinking and acting alternatively

JR is a French artist or, as he defines himself, an “urban artivist”, together an artist and an activist.Indeed,hisprojectsarenotjustaboutart;theyaremuchmore.Hestarteddoinggraffiti in Paris when he was 15 years old, and is now renowned worldwide for illegally pasting in cities across the world oversized black-and-white portraits of individuals printed on paper (Ferdman, 2012,).

His works show a different perspective; he takes pictures from a strange angle and then pastes them at a massive scale in the most improbable places trying to bring our attention to people and facts that we spend most of our lives not caring about, maybe, willing to avoid (Cadwalladr, 2015). In other words, his works seek to open our eyes on what the dominant discourse and practices of development and the media have made invisible.

In all his projects, JR spends months on the site, getting to know the local community, and once he starts the project, he works alongside the local people. In this way, they actively contribute during the whole artistic process, taking the pictures, deciding the perfect place where to position them, and finally pasting them (Ferdman, 2012).

Moreover, his anonymity has a double explanation: strategically, not to be recognised, and symbolically, to let the works be connected just to the local people and their message. In this way, the artworks represent just the individuals or communities who are ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream media. Indeed, JR and his team always left immediately after the end of a project. Thus, the media and those who want to know about the work have to go directly to the local people and get an explanation from them. This is what happened with the project “Women Are Heroes” (2008 - 2011). The project had the purpose to underline the pivotal role in society of women and to tell their invisible and heroic stories marked by

poverty, local crime, violence, and war by pasting their expressive portraits in unexpected places oftheirvillages (JR-website). In Kenya, for example,theeyes and faces oflocal women werepastedon the rooftops oftheirhouses11 andon aworking train (Figure1); whilein Brazil, on the buildings of a favela’s mountainside (Figure 2).

Figure 1. 28 Millimètres, Women Are Heroes, Action in Kibera Slum, General View, Kenya, 2009. (Source: Women Are Heroes, Kenya, 2009)

Figure 2. 28 Millimètres, Women Are Heroes, Action in Favela Morro da Providencia, Favela by day, Rio de Janeiro, 2008. (Source: Women Are Heroes, Brazil, 2010)

Consequently, these giant artworks captured the media's attention, and due to the JR’s disappearance and the absence of more information, they were forced to go to talk with the community where instead of an explanation, they found many stories. Thus, as he affirmed in his speech, this project creates a bridge between the media and these anonymous women (JR, 2011).

However,Iconsiderhis wayofthinkingandworkingasanalternativenotonlybecause his projects are a means of resistance to the dominant discourse reproduced by mainstream development but also because they concretely embody and put into practice an anti-capitalist

11 In this case, a water-resistant material was used instead of paper and glue, which also proved useful to strengthen their rooftops, thus protecting them from the rain.

mindset. Indeed, he refuses to work with brands or institutions or to use corporate sponsors (Cadwalladr, 2015). In this way, he has no responsibility to anyone but himself and the subjects of the portraits (JR, 2011). Thus, in a capitalist system where everything is monetised and depends on the market, he manages to act free from it and, moreover, to materially dismantle it with his works. Indeed, in cities where the only images as big as JR’s artworks are the advertising poster, he replaces products with people, returning the cities to their communities (Cadwalladr, 2015). In other words, since capitalism appropriated the natural and the human environment through urbanism moved by the logic of domination and profit maximisation, with his works he allows people to take back their agency by re-occupying and re-imagining the city (Debord, 1976, quoted in Ferdman, 2012, p. 24).

Turning the world inside out

In 2011, after winning the TED prize, he created the “Inside Out Project”, “the largest global participatory art project” (Inside Out Project, 2011). Through this platform, he gives the opportunity to everyone to be an “artivist”: people all around the world can print their portraits to support an idea, a project, or an action, or just to be seen or tell their stories. The process is easy: you take a picture of yourself, upload it online, and then it will be sent back to you in a black-and-whiteoversizedposterthat youwill pastein your local community (Ferdman, 2012, p). In this way, he could completely take himself out and let the local people be the only leading actors. Indeed, this is also called “the people’s art project”, because it gives people complete agency.

Since it was launched, more than 400,000 people across 138 countries have participated in the project and over 2,000 actions have been created about different topics, such as education, racism, feminism, climate change, diversity, poverty, immigration, indigenous rights (Inside Out Project, 2011). It’s considered a “global” art project because it’s spread worldwide but it’s a completely local phenomenon: it’s the sum of many local projects created by local people to respond to local or global problems (Ferdman, 2012).

The portraits can be considered a form of “urban storytelling”; in the city spaces, they recreate the untold narratives that were erased from the dominant Eurocentric discourse (Ferdman, 2012). For instance, one of the actions of the Inside Out Project - “Indigenise Your Eyes”launchedinOctober2018raisedawareness ofthehistoryandcurrent statusofAmerican Indians in Boulder (USA) (Figure 4). It gave a voice to the local indigenous community.

Figure 4. Inside Out Project, Indigenize Your Eyes, 50 portraits, Action in Boulder, United States, October 2018. (Source: Indigenize Your Eyes, 2018)

Another example is “La Gran Rebelión”, an action of 140 portraits that took place in Cuzco (Perù) in August 2021. This, more than a participatory art project, was an act with which the community re-affirmed the many indigenous voices and lives eliminated by colonialism.

Therefore, since individuals and entire communities claim control over their biological, social, and cultural embodied experiences through the artistic performance of their portraits, in my opinion, these actions can be considered practices of body politics. Indeed, in an indirect way, they use their faces and expressions as “a revolutionary political and expressive medium” (Harcourt, 2019).

Additionally, since more than 300 actions are school projects, the Inside Out Project has also had an impact on education (Inside Out Project, 2011). For example, in September 2020, 80 portraits showing fear, joy, anger, and astonishment about our planet were pasted on the Prins Henrik school of Copenhagen (Denmark) to fight climate change.

Indeed, since education has a central role in development (Morarji, 2014), it’s essential to include it in the alternative practices to equip the new generations with the skills, knowledge, and agency to put in practice a cultural and ecological transition. And in this case, the change that these projects bring lies in seeing students not anymore as passive objects whose heads have to be filled with mainstream knowledge but as active subjects that want to learn, participate, and act.

Figure 5. Inside Out Project, La Gran Rebelión, 140 portraits, Action in Cusco, Peru, August 2021. (Source: "LA GRAN REBELIÓN", 2021)

Can art change the world?

When JR won the TED Prize 2011, they asked him to make a wish to change the world. Thus, he started to wonder: “Can art change the world?”. However, as he explains in his related speech: “Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world.” (JR, 2011). According to John Dewey (1934), art is a medium of transformation (Lumenta, Ariefiansyah, and Nurhadist, 2017). Materially, it can transform a block of marble into a sculpture, a canvas into a painting, or, in this case, a city landscape into an artwork. However, it also has intangibleeffects: it transforms thepeopleinvolvedin theartistic process (Lumenta, Ariefiansyah, and Nurhadist, 2017). Indeed, some anthropologists using participatory and creative engagement in the arts in their research have shown how it enables individuals to interact and collaborate (Lumenta, Ariefiansyah, and Nurhadist, 2017). An example is the project “Face2Face” (2007), the biggest illegal urban art exhibition in the world. It consisted inpastingnexttoeachotheronboththeIsraeliandthePalestiniansidesofthewalltheportraits of Palestinians and Israelis that held the same job (such as teacher, taxi-driver, lawyer, chef,) and doing a funny face for the camera (Ferdman, 2012). JR wanted to demonstrate how things were a bit distant from what the media showed (JR, 2011). Indeed, they were “so different” from each other that looking at the pasted portraits, the local people couldn't say who was the Israeli and the Palestinian. Indeed, art nullifies cultural, social, and economic differences and controversies allowing us to see each other just as artists and, above all, as humans. Art visually reminds us how much we are similar rather than different.

In particular, the iconic black-and-white portraits are transformative in two aspects: for the people photographed in the perception of themselves and for those who observe them in the perception that they have of “the others”. Indeed, in the first case, the portraits allow the individuals to be empowered, to develop a sense of awareness and self-respect, to achieve agency, and in some cases, also redemption. In the second one, they can change how we see differences and decide to deal with them. In other words, they have the power to create a dialogue, a bridge, a connection between different people; they have the power to humanise (Torgovnick, 2017).

Figure 6. 28 Millimètres, Face 2 Face, Holy Triptych, 2006. (Source: Face 2 Face, 2007)

Conclusion

Moving away from the mainstream road and relying more on ordinary people’s ideas and actions that contribute to create more humane and culturally and ecologically sustainable worlds, JR’s projects can represent an example of how to move towards the new postdevelopment era (Shiva, 1993; Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997; Rist, 1997; Esteva and Prakash, 1999 quoted in Escobar, 2007).

JR’s works open your eyes to how more complex and beautiful our world is instead of how the media and the mainstream discourse depict it to you. They show us a pluralistic view of the world, answering to the Zapatista call for creating “a world where many worlds fit” and resisting the dualistic view perpetuated by development. In other worlds, breaking the dominant discourse and giving space to the untold and erased narratives, overcoming barriers, resisting the logic of the capitalistic system, taking back the cities, working at the same time globally and locally, these projects contribute to connecting our humanity, using literally just paper and glue (JR, 2011).

To conclude, these projects represent a post-development resistance because they question the main assumptions of the mainstream development order and put into practice an alternative set of ethics and values which have at their core the valorisation of what makes us humans (Harcourt, 2019).

References

“80

PORTRAITS POUR

LA PLANÈTE” (2020), Inside Out Project [online]. Available at: https://www.insideoutproject.net/en/explore/group-action/80-portraits-pour-la-planete (Accessed: 06 December 2022).

Cadwalladr, C. (2015) “Interview. JR: ‘I realized I was giving people a voice’”, TheGuardian [online], 11 October. Available at:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/11/artist-jr-i-realised-i-wasgiving-people-a-voice-les-bosquets-french-banksy (Accessed: 4 January 2022).

Escobar, A. (2007) “Post-development as concept and social practice” in A. Ziai (ed) Exploring Post-Development: theory and practice, problems and perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 18-31.

“Face2Face” (2007), JR-Website [online]. Available at: https://www.jrart.net/projects/israel-palestine (Accessed: 06 December 2022).

Ferdman, B. (2012) “Urban Dramaturgy: The Global Art Project of JR”, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 34(3), pp. 12–26.

Harcourt, W. (2019) “Body Politics and Postdevelopment” in Postdevelopment in Practice, London: Routledge, pp. 247-262.

“Indigenize your eyes” (2018), Inside Out Project [online]. Available at: https://www.insideoutproject.net/en/explore/group-action/indigenize-your-eyes (Accessed: 06 December 2022).

Inside Out Project (2011). Available at: https://www.insideoutproject.net/en/ (Accessed: 29 December 2021).

JR (2011) “My wish: use art to turn the world inside out”, TED [online]. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/jr_my_wish_use_art_to_turn_the_world_inside_out (Accessed: 2 January 2022).

JR (2012) “One year of turning the world inside out”, TED [Online]. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/jr_one_year_of_turning_the_world_inside_out (Accessed: 2 January 2022).

JR-website (2019). Available at: https://www.jr-art.net (Accessed: 29 December 2021)

“LA GRAN REBELIÓN” (2021), Inside Out Project [online]. Available at: https://www.insideoutproject.net/en/explore/group-action/la-gran-rebelion (Accessed: 06 December 2022).

Lumenta, D., Ariefiansyah, R. and Nurhadist, B. (2017) “Performing Out of Limbo: Reflections on Doing Anthropology through Music with Oromo Refugees in Indonesia”, Antropologi Indonesia, 38(1), pp. 51.

Lugones, M. (2010) “Toward a decolonial feminism”, Hypatia, 25(4), pp. 742-759.

Morarji, K. (2014) “Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India”, European journal of development research, 26(2), pp. 175-189.

Torgovnick, K. (2017) “Gallery: Powerful portraits of people who’ve been overlooked”, TED [online], 28 November. Available at: https://ideas.ted.com/powerful-portraits-ofpeople-whove-been-overlooked/ (Accessed: 2 January 2022).

“Women Are Heroes, Brazil” (2010), JR-Website [online]. Available at: https://www.jrart.net/projects/rio-de-janeiro (Accessed: 06 December 2022).

“Women Are Heroes, Kenya” (2009), JR-Website [online]. Available at: https://www.jrart.net/projects/woman-are-heroes-kenya (Accessed: 06 December 2022).

Inclusive human development in AwuraAmba community: Apost-Development perspective

By Yilikal M Engida, Ethiopia Introduction

The Awura Amba community was founded in 1972 by Zumra Nuru Mohammad with 17 people from a neighboring community and now has a population of over 465 people (Chuffa et al., 2015). "Zumra was born on August 21, 1947 [Ethiopian calendar]" (Joumard, 2021) in a rural place called Awura Amba in Amhara regional state, Ethiopia. He grew up watching his mother and father working outside equally. When they came home, his mother's work continued, but his father was able to rest. He wondered why women were expected to do extra chores. So, at the age of four, he began asking his family about gender equality and religious differences.Becauseofhisunexpectedquestioning,hewasclassifiedasdeviantfromthenorm and considered him mentally ill. His mother was searching for traditional healers to find medicine for Zumra's illness (Sniewski, 2015). The male-centered and patriarchal nature of the community, the question goes, considered him a deviant and he was therefore excluded from the community. When he was 13 years old, his family was kicked out of the house because of his unacceptable questions. As a result, he was exiled for five years. Despite these challenges, he founded the community (Joumard, 2010). He was given the title of ambassador and the community was awarded two gold medals by the United Nations (ibid). Thegoldenguiding principles oftheAwuraAmbacommunityarerespect fortherights of women to equality, the rights of children, support for people who can no longer work due to illness or retirement, the elimination of evil words and deeds, and the acceptance of all as brothers and sisters. According to its principles and practices, the community is free from any outside influence. According to Shiva (1993); Rahnema and Bawtree (1997); Rist (1997); Esteva and Prakash (1999), cited in Escobar (2007), post-development is the genuine mobilisation at the social and local level that respects people, sustains the environment, and relies less on the import of knowledge. Taking into account the principles of the community, this essay will be divided into four themes: Gender Equality, Race and Religion, Children's Rights, and a Social Security System. Finally, this essay will attempt to connect to the theory of how the Awura Amba community has been transformative with unique approaches to economic, political, and sociocultural changes.

Gender equality

There is a gendered society in Ethiopia where women are not considered as capable as men, especially in productive activities. Gender segregation is common in everyday activities. According to Nkenkana, “Gender relations permeate the whole of society; they are structures as well as daily practices” (2015, p. 77). What distinguishes Awura Amba from other parts of Ethiopia is that women and men are treated equally. No one is superior, no one is inferior. Children grow up observing what the power relations are in their families. Since the beginning of the community, thoughts and practices are passed from family to family to their children. For example, roles are not assigned based on sex, but on their skills and specialisations. Men and women play equally important roles in the production, reproduction, and management of the community. Women have full autonomy to do what they want as long as they can. However, their freedom is limited within the community. Since communities surrounding them still subordinate and discriminate against women, both ideologically and practically. Apart from the gender division of labour, women and men have an equal share in decision-

making at home and in the community. In terms of gender equality, the Awura Amba community has beenmoreinclusivecomparedto surrounding communitiessinceits inception. Moreover, at the household level, men and women have equal rights when it comes to matters of marriage and family planning. Marriage, for example, is a private matter between a manandawoman, enteredwithoutfamilyinvolvement.Awomanhasfullautonomytochoose her spouse without interference from the family. After marriage, a woman has the inalienable right to decidewhenand howto useresources andwhenandhowto usecontraceptivemethods for family planning. If necessary, she can use any contraceptive method she chooses without consulting her husband. In terms of reproductive justice, Harcourt (2019) asserts that women and other genders are given autonomy over their own bodies when deciding whether to have children. The freedom to do what people want makes the community an intriguing place to live and adopt into other places. The practice of the Awura Amba community goes beyond the metaphor that it was done in a way that is consistent with post-development theory. Harcourt (2019) stated as:

“Post [-] development aims to go beyond the metaphors, ideologies, and premises of developmentinitsanalysisofdevelopmentasacontestedsetofcultural,political,economic, and historical processes and relations.”

Community members do not only preach but also live out what they have told us to do. Regarding the question of who is superior, a man or a woman? Zumra believes that if superiority is based on physical power, let’s use that energy for work; why do we use it inhumanely for hurting others?

Race and religion

Zumeras's new way of thinking has been done in the community, and his approach to race and religion is unique. According to Escobar (1995; 2008), quoted in Harcourt (2019), “postdevelopment is the unmaking of development through the intervention of new narratives, new ways of thinking and doing”. The community believes that all people belong to one race. For them, all people are created equal. No one is superior or inferior because of their gender, race, ethnicity, or other status in the community. However, if we compare how ethnicity is treated in the surrounding community, there is a big difference. People lose their lives because of the constant ethnic conflicts. In Ethiopia, for example, women are the biggest victims due to religious and ethnic conflicts. To give a concrete example: The ethnic-based war in the northern parts of Ethiopia forced women to be raped by organised groups.

As far as religion is concerned, the members of the community do not believe in a divine power, but in the existence of a creator who created the sky, the earth, the night, the day, the woman and the man, the air, the sun and all the creatures that live on the planet, and they express their faith through good deeds. As a result of compatibility, members of the community live by doing good deeds for others while avoiding negative deeds toward others (Yirga, 2007, cited in Ekimie, 2021). The community lives by the motto, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (ibid, 2021). Doing good and avoiding bad speech can create a peaceful world by creating brotherhood and sisterhood among religious, ethnic, and non-believers. Even if they believe in only one God, no one is prevented from being a member of the community if he or she accepts the basic principles.

Children’s rights

As one of the principles of the community, children have equal rights as adults; they are allowed to express their ideas in the family and in the community. They are free, regardless of

their sex. But if we observe the surrounding community, their labour is exploited by their own families. In addition to the exploitation, they are also prevented from expressing their ideas. In Awura Amba, however, both girls and boys have the same right to argue or express ideas in front of their families and others. Not only that, but there is no gender preference in the community: Girls and boys are seen in the same lens. Equality for children is a milestone for the life chances of the next generations in democracy and progress. Compared to the neighbouring communities, it is exactly the opposite. Here, patriarchal thoughts are passed on, preventing women from benefiting from development. “...the backlash against 'women's issues' is a backlash against democracy and progressive change” (Tamale, 2006, p. 39).

Social protection

The community attaches great importance to helping people who are no longer able to work because of their age or health problems. They believe that people should come first and only then materials, because you can throw away materials after you have used them up, but people should not be thrown away, they should be respected. This is one of the most important principles they follow, and they have been doing this practically since 1972. The community has built a centre for these services for the elderly. Another important point that makes them unique is the fact that the centre is open to outsiders, without differences in religion, race, or gender. Moreover, the members of the community do not worry about the fate of their children when death occurs, because everything is shared, including the risks. Due to family risk, no one is left behind. Both wealth and challenges are shared within the community. According to Ultra et al. (2012), quoted in Gerber and Raina (2018), the fourth king of Bhutan replied to a journalist, “We arenot concerned about Gross National Product; we care about Gross National Happiness”. Accordingly, while material possessions are important to the people, they do a lot for the people. There are similarities between the king and the Awura Amba community's idea of being humane and caring more about happiness than money. Many aspects of post-development theory are reflected in the ideological thoughts and practices of the Awura Amba community. As Pieterse (2000) noted about post-development theory, it differs from existing critical development approaches in its strong opposition to development, rather than modifying some aspects. Similarly, Harcourt (2019) defines, “postdevelopment is a new way of thinking and narratives in which it unmakes development” Thus, since they have been practically living their golden guiding principles and sharing the ideas of Piererse and Harcourt, the community seems to be connected to the newly developed postdevelopment theory.

Conclusion

The community’s milestone is the guiding principles: respect for women's rights to equality, children's rights, and support for people who can no longer work due to illness or retirement. The ideas were not imported from elsewhere but learned from the experiences he (Zumra) had in his family and community. According to the golden principles, his importance raised questions about the patriarchal society of the time, which considered him a deviant rather than a visionary. The community has been living in peace and equality since its inception, regardless of gender, age group, colour or religion. Moreover, anyone who has retired due to old age, physical or mental illness is entitled to social welfare. When we examine the connection between ideologies and practices in the community, we see a direct connection to the long-term desire for women, children, and the elderly to be heard and to have the opportunity to express their needs and priorities. Not only they are practicing this principle today, but they are also preparing their children for a successful future. Therefore, based on

their golden guiding principles and daily life, the community seems to share the postdevelopment theory and it can be an alternative to a new mainstream development.

References

Ekimie, G, M. (2021) ‘Awramba Community: The Unique Cultural Practices as a Center of Cultural Tourism’, Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Sports. doi: org/10.7176/jths/5303

Escobar, A. (2017) ‘Post-development’ as concept and social practice’, in Exploring post development: theory and practice, problem, and perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 18–32. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203962091.

Gerber, J. F., and Raina, R. S. (2018) ‘Post-Growth in the Global South? Some Reflections from India and Bhutan’, Ecological Economics, 150, pp. 353–358. doi: org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.02.020

Harcourt,W.(2019)‘Bodyofpolitics andpostdevelopment’,in Postdevelopmentinpractice: alternatives, economies, and ontologies. London: Routledge, pp.247-262.

Joumard, R. (2010) ‘Awra Amba, an Ethiopian utopia’, undefined [Preprint]. Available at: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Awra-Amba%2C-an-Ethiopian-utopiaJoumard/3f3990087644e0de39013850480a32af352cd281 (Accessed: 8 December 2021).

Joumard, R. (2021) Awra Amba, a utopia between myth and reality. PhD Dissertation. Available at: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03199059/document (Accessed: 15 December 2021).

Mengesha, S. K., Meshelemiah, J. C. A., and Chuffa, K. A. (2015) ‘Asset-based community development practiceinAwramba,Northwest Ethiopia’, CommunityDevelopment,46(2), pp. 164–179. doi: org/10.1080/15575330.2015.1009923

Nkenkana, A. (2015) ‘No African futures without the liberation of women: A decolonial feminist perspective’, Africa Development, 40(3), pp.41-57.

Pieterse, J. N. (2000) ‘After post-development’, Third World Quarterly, 21(2), pp. 175–191. doi:org/10.1080/01436590050004300

Sniewski, L. (2015) The Ethiopian Utopia in Awura Amba, Ethiopia. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsF8HN4Whrw&t=2s (Accessed: 5 December 2021).

Tamale, S. (2006). ‘African Feminism: How should we change?’ Development, 49(1), pp. 38–41. doi: org/10.1057/palgrave.development.11002

Degrowth and the Circular Economy: Incorporation that Makes a Better World

By Rafiatu Abdul-Salam, Ghana Introduction

Social movements like degrowth over the past few years have been used as a conceptual tool for analysis to debunk the notion of generating wealth by just growing at the detriment of people’s welfare (Millward and Takhar, 2019). Degrowth, which is an evolving research field andasocialmovement,hasitsoriginsinFrance,whereitwasinspiredandpromotedbyFrench academics and activists. Originating in the early twenty-first century, it had the intention of attaining social and environmental sustainability through a deliberate communal restraint in production and consumption (Demaria et. al., 2013). It focuses on restructuring the society with new values through downscaling, redistribution, and production and consumption stabilisation.

This essay will examine degrowth as a movement that fosters cultural and ecological transitions, as well as how this collection of transformational efforts varies from mainstream development. The essay begins by discussing the background of degrowth as a movement, considering the places and people that form development discourse narratives. Then it looks at how it addresses the ecological and economic challenges resulting from growth to suggest alternatives or remedies to these critical developmental issues. It concludes by criticising degrowth and suggesting circular economy as a type of synergy that would create a more sustainable and equitable society.

Background of degrowth

"Decroissance," which implies "reduction," had been invented in France about 1972 to describe a new sociocultural route and afterward mentioned throughout writings by eminent scholars such as Amar (1976), Gorz (1977), and Georgescus-Roegen (1979) following Meadow’s Report to the Club of Rome, named, "The Limits of Growth" (Demaria, Schneider, Sekulova and Martinez-Alier, 2013).

The term became popular in the 2000s in France as a mantra in collective actions (Gerber, 2020). Its English term Degrowth was created during the initial global symposium on degrowth held in the French capital in 2008. And has stayed and attained a lot of interest in academic circles ever since. Following the Paris symposium, other symposiums were organised in Barcelona (2010), Venice (2012), and Leipzig (2014) (Demaria et al., 2013).

According to Sekulova, Kallis, Rodríguez-Labajos and Schneidr (2013), degrowth is a:

“Collaborative and deliberate procedure designed to attain an equal downscaling of total ability to generate and use, as well as the function of markets and economic transactions” (Sekulova et al., 2012, p. 1).

Degrowth encourages economies with reduced metabolic activities but with distinct structures and functions whiles problematising growth which is the core of capitalism as becoming a specific method of defining a decent society, based on the premise that more market transactions equal moreneeds being addressedwhich is detrimental to theenvironment and long-term wellbeing (Gerber, 2020). Consequently, degrowth has become one of the most recent additions to the Development discourse. The English version was made notable through academic journals written by Giorgios Kallis, Martinez Alier, and a host of others.

Ecological degrowth

In the early 1970s, environmental concerns resulting from reckless exploitation for growth came to the fore (Sachs, 2010). By scrutinising the extent to which it can satisfy these wants, the environment is under pressure to provide and sustain mankind's unquenchable needs these past years. Without an alternative to the impacts, industries rely largely on the environment for their supply of energy and input for products which could result in loss. However, finding a way to safeguard the ecosystem prompted the creation of the concept of sustainable development referred to as an approach that satisfies the present required needs without jeopardising the unborn descendant’s ability to fulfil their personal desires according to the Brundtland report (1987) (cited in Keeble, 1988).

This explanation may seem pleasant, but it is virtually difficult to implement. Green energy technologies such as wind, solar, and other renewables, are now seen as a solution to the environmental concerns connected with fossil fuels by proponents of sustainable development. However, the British economist William Stanley Jevons demonstrated in 1865 that improvements in technology that made coal more efficient in the UK led to an increase in coal consumption among sectors (Clark and Foster, 2001). This means that even if we develop technologies that consume less power and resources, their effectiveness will increase demand, cancelling out the benefits of those technologies. Thus, it’s obvious from this instance that technology and inventions are incapable of reducing indiscriminate ecological destruction; at best, they decrease the growth limit (Demaria et al., 2012).

The degrowth movement believes that the extraction of materials necessary to service the economy's economic purpose, like dematerialisation, should be reduced to zero (MartinezAlier, 2010). This necessitates doing more or producing additional along with fewer power or resources till we are able to create devoid of neither power nor resources (Luke, 2010). This supports the idea that we should cut or substantially limit the number of materials we take from mines and oil wells, as well as the pace at which unwholesome gases are released into the environment.

Economic degrowth

In today's world, it's unusual for a government to address its people without addressing economic growth. As a result, environmental pressure must be used to build an economy with terrible consequences. GDP is one of the most often cited indicators of a country's economic success (Ross, 2017). GDP measures an economy's output, revenue, and spending. However, it exposes nothing about the distribution of development, fails to account for unpaid domestic work and voluntary activities, and, most importantly, fails to illuminate the social and environmental repercussions of growth. As a result, proponents of degrowth advocate for a comprehensive measure to account for an economy's growth. Degrowth advocates and researchers advocate for multiple standards and inclusive evaluation of the overall market, based on the development of several viable measures of societal, intellectual, ecological, and financial progress (Zografos and Howarth, 2008; Shmelev and Rodríguez, 2009,). Since GDP growth is linked to greater compressions on environmental issues, biodiversity, and the loss of human living standards at resource borders, some degrowth advocates believe that leaders of the economy should go beyond GDP by establishing a set of principles and guidelines to limit the reduction of energy and materials (Martinez-Alier, 2010).

One of the most significant aspects of poverty alleviation is economic growth (Roemer and Gugerty, 2007). Economic growth is often recognised as one of the most essential variables in poverty reduction and it is presumed as a vital development goal that may be met through economic growth and income distribution, resulting in human happiness and wellbeing. Many governments have attempted but failed to reduce poverty through various

economic interventions and techniques. India for example has expanded its wealth by 211 percent over the past 15 years (Sinha, 2015). Various polls have asserted the wealthiest ten percent of the population owns 370 times as much as the poorest ten percent (Rukimi, 2017).

On the other hand, the growth distribution will offer a different picture. It is assumed the problem is unequal wealth distribution rather than growth. Further, there is also no guarantee that economic progress will lead to happiness and well-being. The World Happiness Report in 2012 states “the international economic powerhouse USA has made stunning economic and technological growth over the previous half-century without improvements in the people’s self-reported happiness” (cited in Helliwell, Layard and Sachs, 2012, p. 3).

This is consistent with Richard Easterlin's (1974) research on the link between wealth and residents’ satisfaction in his famous "Easterlin Paradox." In contrast to persons living within a country, his study shows that economies with higher per capita income have a negative relationship with residents' self-reported happiness (Easterlin, 1974). Even though succeeding academics disagreed with these beliefs. Degrowth proponents align themselves with modern scientific studies of happiness and how it affects individuals and communities to this end. Friendship, family time, sex, and the daily effort to attain fulfilment from these and other desirable activities (Helliwell et al., 2012) are more convincing measures of happiness than economic development indicators.

Critiques of degrowth

It has been argued that degrowth movements have failed to consider the quantitative (how much growth) versus qualitative (benefits, both positive and negative) aspects of growth, as well as how they affect the environment or nature and the resulting health issues (Schwartzman, 2012). In this sense, degrowths are so fixated on the downsides that they forget to conduct a full analysis of the entire system. The focus should be on the type of ecological growth that will be sustainable for humanity, while also designing barriers to mitigate its negative health consequences. Degrowth critics have criticised the present regime's credo of reduced consumption, stating that "fewer resources corresponds [to] less pollution" is not always the case. As a result, it is ineffective in moderating environmental stresses. This argument comes from the uncertainty that might arise because of the determinant and manner of assessing consumption, which is either physical/quantity or monetary/value (Van den Bergh, 2015). It all comes down to how one can quantify consumption and the methods and units that will be utilised to do so.

When it comes to growth concerns, Bonaiuti (2012) and others say that the need for social limitations of economic expansion is the way forward on several grounds. According to David Schwartzman, the communal limit of economic progress has been unsuccessful in justifying the many discrepancies in company globalisation because it does not factor in the rising population of the world's city centres and the problems that come with it, as well as how governments are designing procedures to address these issues. The adoption of "Green Urbanism," for example, is one of the techniques adopted by city governments to mitigate the increasing threat of CO3 (Schwartzman, 2012). As a result, limiting expansion will have a significant influence on the needs of these enormous metropolitan populations.

The Circular Economy

Figure1. The Circular Economy.

Source: https://biomimicry.org/how-i-found-the-circular-economy-biomimicry-and-the-power-of-design/

For a more environmentally sustainable planet, the focus should be placed not just on creating and consuming less, or on solving poverty challenges, but also on restorative product and material reuse and recycling. Recycling items and materials create jobs while conserving energy and reducing resource consumption and waste. To achieve this, the European Union, as well as numerous corporations and national governments throughout the globe, which includes China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland, should focus on the circular economy idea (cited in Korhonen, Honkasalo, and Seppälä, 2018).

As stated by these experts, circular economy is a societal manufacturing process that optimises utility generated by the unidirectional energy and resource productivity cycle of life. To attain this, emphasis must be on utilising the recurring material instabilities, geothermal power, and tumbling power flows (Korhonen et al., 2018). As an outcome, a strong circular economy supports all three aspects of long-term sustainability (social, economic, and ecological). Thus, in a circular economy, ecological cycles are utilised in market phases through preserving its inherent procreation capacity, limiting output circulation to the degree to which the earth endures (Korhonen et. al., 2018).

Conclusion

The essay discussed the origin of degrowth as a movement, how its tackles the economic and ecological challenges birthed by growth. Also, it discussed the critique of degrowth and an alternative that promotes long-term sustainability. The degrowth movement propositions are critical to comprehending the environmental harm caused by mankind's desire for energy and material wants. However, these solutions are insufficient to address global concerns.

As a result, a combination of effective degrowth measures and circular economy initiatives should be pursued. These movements can complement the State to achieve the sustainable world we envision through principles of great “governance” especially “in areas of limited statehood” (Börzel and Risse, 2010). That would be the only way to save mankind from the looming catastrophe caused by our insatiable need to amass wealth.

References

Bonaiuti, M. (2012) “Degrowth: Tools for a Complex Analysis of the Multidimensional Crisis”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 23(1), pp. 30-50.

Börzel Tanja A and Risse, T. (2010) “Governance Without a State: Can It Work?: Governance Without a State,” Regulation & Governance, 4(2), pp. 113–134. doi: 10.1111/j.17485991.2010.01076.x

Demaria, F., F. Schneider, F. Sekulova and J. Martinez-Alier (2013) “What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement”, Environmental Values 22(2), pp. 191215.

Easterlin, R.A. (1974) “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence”, Nations and households in economic growth 89, pp. 89-125.

Gerber, J. (Julien-François) (2020) “Degrowth and Critical Agrarian Studies,” The Journal of Peasant Studies vol. 47 no. 2, pp. 235-264. Available at: http://repub.eur.nl/pub/125674 (Accessed: 20 December 2021).

Helliwell, J., Layard, R. and Sachs, J., (2012) “World happiness report”.

How IFound the Circular Economy: BiomimicryandthePowerofDesign (2020)Biomimicry Institute. Image Courtesy of: Cambridge Judge Business School. (Accessed: December 31 2021). <https://biomimicry.org/how-i-found-the-circular-economy-biomimicry-andthe-power-of-design/>

Keeble, B.R. (1988) “The Brundtland Report: Our Common Future”, Medicine and war 4(1), pp. 17-25.

Korhonen, J., Honkasalo, A. and Seppälä, J., (2018) “Circular Economy: The Concept and its Limitations”. Ecological Economics, 143, pp. 37-46.

Luke, T.W. (2010) “Ephemeralization as Environmentalism: Rereading R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”, Organization &Environment 23(3), pp. 354-362.

Martinez-Alier, J. (2012) “Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance between Two Movements”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 23(1), pp. 51-73.

Millward P., and Takhar S., (2019) “Social Movements, Collective Action, and Activism,” Sociology, 53(3), p. 12. doi: 10.1177/0038038518817287

Roemer, M. and M.K. Gugerty (1997) “Does Economic Growth Reduce Poverty?” Harvard Institute for International Development CAER II Discussion Paper 4, Cambridge, MA.

Ross, S. (2021) 'What are the Best Measurements of Economic Growth'. Article on Investopedia. (Accessed: December 2021) <https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032515/what-are-best-measurementseconomic-growth.asp#ixzz52rEYBteF>

Rukmini, S. (2017) 'India’s Staggering Wealth Gap in Five Charts'. Article on The Hindu. (Accessed: December 2021) <https://www.thehindu.com/data/indias-staggering-wealthgap-in-five-charts/article10935670.ece>

Sachs, W. (2010) “The Development Dictionary: a guide to Knowledge as power “Second Edition London: Zed Books.

Schwartzman, D. (2012) “A Critique of Degrowth and its Politics”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 23(1), pp. 119-125.

Sekulova, F., G. Kallis, B. Rodríguez-Labajos and F. Schneider (2012) “Degrowth: From Theory to Practice”, Journal of Cleaner Production 38, pp. 1-6.

Shmelev, S.E. and B. Rodríguez-Labajos (2009) “Dynamic Multidimensional Assessment of Sustainability at the Macro Level: The Case of Austria”, Ecological Economics 68(10), pp. 2560-2573.

Sinha, K. (2015) 'India’s Wealth Rose 211% in Last 15 Years'. Article on The Times of India. Accessed: (December 2021). <https://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indiaswealth-rose-211-in-last-15-years/articleshow/49575303.cms>

Son, H.H. and N. Kakwani (2004) “Economic growth and poverty reduction”: Initial conditions matter.

Stevenson, B. and J. Wolfers (2008) “Economic growth and subjective well-being: reassessing the Easterlin paradox”.

Van den Bergh, J. (2015) “Green Agrowth as a Third Option: Removing the GDP-Growth Constraint on Human Progress”

Zografos, C. and R. Howarth (2008) “Towards a Deliberative Ecological Economics”, Deliberative ecological economics, pp. 1-20.

By Archana R. Vikraman, India

Introduction

Using Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice, this essay examines the actors involved in movements relating to the Sabarimala Temple Entry Judgment of 2018 by the Supreme Court of India which removed the ban on women of 10-50 years of age from entering the temple. Analysing the inability of these movements to address Kerala’s covert patriarchy, I highlight the role movements and discourses play in challenging the patriarchal structure that polices and codifies bodies, interactions, and access to spaces – sacred or not. Firstly I lay out the religious and cultural background behind menstruation in Kerala India. Secondly, I examine the paradox of compliance of these menstrual restrictions. Finally, I conclude by teasing out the contradictions in the current government’s response and the responses of movements in addressing the covert patriarchy in Kerala.

To menstruate,or not to menstruate:Understanding movements preserving culture

Sabarimala is a temple dedicated to Lord Ayyappa and it is located in Pathanamthitta District of Kerala, India. As the child of two major gods in Hindu Mythology, Shiva and Vishnu (who took the female form of Mohini), he was destined to kill the demoness Mahishi who wreaks havoc on the world by destroying fertility and reproduction. After killing the demoness, Ayyappawasadoptedby achildlessmortalkingwhobuiltSabarimalatohonourhisendeavour (Vadakinniyil, 2019; Joseph, 2019). People of all religions, class, and caste are allowed entry to the temple. A unique instance of religious harmony is the shrine that lies east of Sabarimala and honours Vavar, a muslim warrior who helped Ayyappa. When Ayyappa manifests in the form of Lord Shashtha, people of all genders are allowed to enter his temples. There are restrictions in temples where he takes the form of a celibate ascetic, but women are allowed to enter, except in the case of Sabarimala. On the surface, it is a space of liminality and communitas (Vadakinniyil, 2019), but onelearns that it is a space of contradictions that ignites strong emotions.

Dominant brahman traditions and knowledge claim that visits to Shastha temples activate different energies in your body. One of six Shashta temples, Sabarimala, activates the Ajna chakra (located between eyebrows and activating the hypothalamus and pituitary glands) raising a person’s creative energy. By withholding bodily fluids associated with creation(i.e. celibacy), one can harness the energy of the Ajna chakra to attain spiritual liberation (Joseph, 2019). Devotees emulating Lord Ayyappa (a “brahmachari”/celibate ascetic) can thus attain spiritual liberation. They wear black, blue, or saffron clothing; walk barefoot; sleep on the floor; address themselves as “swami” (ascetic); let their hair grow out; bathe and visit temple twice a day; control their diet by abstaining from meat and alcohol; and avoid touching menstruating women, luxury and attending funerals. They remain celibate throughout this period (Asianet, 2018). Younger boys and girls, and older women who do not menstruate also do this to prepare for the pilgrimage. Devotees don’t follow all the rules of the pilgrimage, but they will not be denied entry because of their distinguishable characteristics. Thus, they emulate an alternative to their daily life through devotion to achieve spiritual liberation.

Oldenburg (1990) cites Romila Thapar's perspective on Hindu ascetics to highlight this alternative which rejects the householder stage of a man’s role in society:

Who is ‘right’here? Who is ‘quiet’here?

“To this extent such movements may be regarded as movements of dissent. But the element of protest was muted by the wish, not to change society radically, but to stand aside and create an alternative system” (Thapar, 1978 quoted in Oldenburg 1978, p. 277).

When women of reproductive age are excluded from participation in the pilgrimage, this imposes an ideal of purity via celibacy which again reinforces patriarchal power and the pollution framework that exists within dominant brahmin tradition. Joseph and Vadakinniyil (2019) assign protective exclusionary value to the ban of women as it might hurt their reproductive ability. In the Supreme Court proceeding, the lawyers defending the ban claimed that the deity is a brahmachari and the ban was assigned negative exclusionary value to protect the deity’s celibate energy which may be reduced due to the presence of menstrual bodies (Venkatesan, 2018; Krishnan, 2006). The ban was not even a norm across history, as visits from the queen of the royal family of Travancore have been recorded and the rule regarding menstruation got instituted in 1965 and legalised by 1990 (Kumari, 2019). Therefore, certain women received conditional access based oncaste andprivilege after receivingpious approval before the 1990.

Compliance of Menstruation: Reconciling Paradoxes

After visiting a Shashtha temple, Joseph (2019) reflected on the dangerous effect the temple’s energy had on women, making her forget their material responsibilities and devote themselves to a life of prayer. However, why is one body given choice and access while another is deprived of the same? Why is one body allowed entry into a space and another banned? Foucault questioned the legitimacy of established practices and the accepted ‘truth’ by linking these practices and knowledge to power imbalances (Mills, 2003). Gender is reduced to biological sex via menstruation which ignores that gender, according to Foucault, is historically constructed (Mills, 2003, pp 72). The notion of equal participation is discredited by these forms of knowledge proposed by dominant groups. Paternal explanations of protection are the reason why the effect of recognition for women via the supreme court judgement is necessaryto counterthelackof choicetheyreceivein orderto participateequally in spaces (Fraser, 1998). This narrative protects dominant group’s positions of social and economic privilege (Krishnan, 2006). The participatory parity (Fraser 1998) that is offered to women via the judgement of 2018 gives women a choice that falls outside the assigned roles available to them in this narrative.

Reconciling contradictions within my evolving beliefs of feminism and privileged experience of traditions in my family which cherish women, is confusing. When a girl starts menstruating they are gifted presents and are celebrated. However, while menstruating, one has to stay away from spaces of prayer. Inthe case ofmy brahminfriends, theyarenot allowed to enter the kitchen. This exclusion is also considered restorative. Thus, there are different variations of menstrual practices and frameworks of understanding. Cohen (2020) elaborates on

"other schools point to menstrual restrictions as indicative of menstruation’s auspicious and powerful nature, demonstrating the diversity of approaches to menstruation beyond of framework of restrictions even within what is perceived as a singular religion[...]Sangam literature (100–500 CE) offers one such example[...]In her analysis of Sangam poetry, Dianne Jenett notes parallels between menarchal girls, menstruants, and goddesses. She argues that menstrual taboos and practices ‘recognize the sacred power of the female and were instituted for reciprocal protection;’ they allow a woman to access and use the ‘sacred power,’ especially potent during menstruation and after childbirth, to her community’s benefit through appropriate self-restraint and separation (2005, 186), " (Cohen 2020, pp. 121-122)

These contradictions create a paradox of compliance towards restrictive practices for menstruaters which can be attributed to what Cohen (2020) noted about menstrual practices across Judaism and Hinduism playing an integral role in “determining, communicating, and maintaining identities, hierarchies, and culture itself... Given that in both Hinduism and Judaism intercourse with a menstruant results in a cursed or defiled state of being for a child should one be conceived, this motivation can be read as a patriarchal desire to ensure progeny of a specific identity and thus the assurance of a continued, bounded community. At the same time, since intercourse with a menstruant communicatesimpuritytoamalepartnerinbothcontexts,itcanbereadasatactictoprevent transmitting impurity through threatening the status of a child should one be conceived. Avishai’s work shows how, regardless of how this underlying motivation is interpreted, observance of menstrual laws on an individual level can also communicate something about one’s idea to a larger community (religious vs. secular identity)” (Cohen, 2020 p. 124).

The force behind the movements in defence of the ban – led by stout devotees, rightwing fundamentalists and left intellectuals –was mainly fuelled by their need to defend their identity. On the other hand, those who supported leftist politics were divided into believers who considered the ban as discriminatory and others who did not. “Ready to Wait”, an online campaign led by female and male devotees, used a choice-based framework to articulate their decision to wait. Members of the statutory Travancore Devaswom board charged with the administration of the temple filed Public Interest Litigations under the Right to Religion (Article 25) guaranteed by the Indian Constitution to protest against the ban. (Kumari 2020) The right-wing parties and devotees’ organisations organised intimidation campaigns and physically barred women from entering the temple.

Even though the reasons are contextualised, one can’t ignore the danger in their explanationsofthelogicoftheban.Throughmisrecognition(Fraser1998)ofmenstrualbodies there are effects of deprivation that echoes hypocritical practices present in a state renowned for being exceptionally literate and developed. Preserving the patriarchy by limiting access and participation to significant spaces sets a precedent that is practiced everywhere in the country.

Feminism: An obstacle, remedy or both?

As a Keralite, my understanding of the protests happening under the western-feminist lens conflicted with the space it was coming from. A Leftist communist government complicit in modern patriarchy and privileged feminists who are essentialising voices of women and invalidating decisions they disagreed which were articulated using the same pro-choice and rights frameworktheywereutilising. Thewomen’swall was aspectacleof385womenjoining to form a human chain to protest against the entry ban. If we look at the Supreme Court judgment, the ‘Happy to Bleed’ and ‘Right to Pray’ campaigns (Kumari, 2019) were very successful. The implementation of the law resulted in violence. The government gave protection to women who wanted to enter the temple and devotees’ organizations along with right-wing Hindu fundamentalist organizations used force to stop them. Arrests were made and police forces were deployed in Sabarimala. The government response was not only to protect women but to curb the growing fundamentalism in Kerala just before the elections where the current central government wanted to gain voters for their nationalist cause. The participation of women in stopping entry challenged the legitimacy of the government and the feminists in being the only voice for women.

Kerala’s government primarily looks at addressing gender justice through the distributive framework of economics and ensured women receive adequate health facilities and education. Fraser (1998) contends one framework is not enough to fix the status injury

that happens through misrecognition. Even though the protests and the law allowing women entry into the temple makes an important change to culture, it isn’t complete without addressing the modern forms of patriarchy that continue to exist in Kerala in more structural and covert forms. If judged by the development and distribution indicators, Kerala is an exceptional state but if there is a qualitative analysis of the same, we see cracks in the qualityof-life women enjoy.

“The state has some of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation and violence against women is widespread. Kerala’s suicide rates are two times the national average, and Kerala leads all other states in India in the number of family murder/suicides. Women are vastly underrepresented in politics. Although women are educated, the female workforce participation rate is one of the lowest in India. There is evidence to suggest that educated, nonworkingwomenareusingtheireducationtowardsecuringabettermarriagematchrather than for employment or empowerment” (Thomas, 2019 p. 254).

Cultural and social barriers placed on women limit their mobility and access to opportunities. Dr J. Devika (year) expands on an understanding of why the protests and judgment didn’t fully align with the covert patriarchy present in Kerala:

"The ‘women’swall’(whateverunintendedconsequencesit mayyield)wasbuiltbymodern patriarchy against pre-modern forms of patriarchal power. The revival of the renaissance discourse served this end by setting the renaissance as untainted by patriarchy and by masking the insidious presence of modern patriarchy in all institutions in Kerala, including the mainstream Left. I am, therefore, unable to join in the celebration over the success of the women’s wall" (as cited in Thomas, 2019 p. 259).

Kumari (2019) clearly underlines that the aspects of religion that are perceived as unjust which intentionally exclude the equal participation of actors is based on a feminist and rights lens. Both essentialise women into passive subjects and fail to account for complicity of not only women but also the institutions which use these lenses. They ignore the power dynamics of caste and patriarchy. The women who participated in the ‘Right to Pray’ and ‘Happy to Bleed’ movements were all articulating their choices as ‘right’ and the women behind the ‘Ready to Wait’ counter campaigns as ‘wrong’ using the rights framework. The exercise of choice needs to be contextualised and respected.

“Saba Mahmood speaks for the women’s religious participation in Egypt and points out that the ‘assumption of human agency especially located in the political and moral autonomy of the subject 65 constitutes a barrier to the exploration of alternative ways of thinking about agency... While progressives dismiss these remarks about women’s willing participation in patriarchal religious observances by calling them misguided or having a ‘falseconsciousness’, Mahmood’s formulation of agency in this religious piety of women in these instances are helpful. She suggests that the concept of agency be ‘delinked from the goals of progressive politics,a tetheringthat hasoftenledtothe incarcerationofthe notionofagency within the trope of resistance against oppression of power’, and that it be understood in the forms of ‘one’s capacity to realises one’s interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will or other obstacles” (Kumari, 2019, p. 299).

Contextualising menstrual practices may be the key to understand and create lasting changewithin communities.Thesocialmovements generatedbySabarimala,demonstratethat justice is hard to arrive at when multiple actors have different interpretations and perceptions. Voices dissenting against the status quo in Kerala can likely bring about change to resist an increasingly fundamental tendency across India. Thus, tensions generated by women crossing borders (Kumari, 2019) that are placed on their menstruating bodies because of this judgment is one of many significant battles that will be fought to create more lasting change in India.

References

Cohen, I. (2020). ‘Menstruation and Religion: Developing a Critical Menstrual Studies Approach,’in Bobel,C.,Winkler, I.T.,Fahs,B., Hasson,K.A, Kissling,E.A.andRoberts, T. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstrual Studies. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.115–129.

Fraser, N. (1998) Social Justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, participation. Working Paper.

Joseph, S. (2019). Women and Sabarimala: The science behind restrictions. Chennai, India: Notion Press.

Krishnan, K. (2006). Sacred Spaces, Secular Norms and Women’s Rights. Economic and Political Weekly, 41(27), pp. 2969–2971. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4418425 (Accessed: 9 January 2022).

Mills, S. (2003). ‘Power/Knowledge,’ in Michael Foucault (1st ed.). London: Routledge, pp.67–79. https://doi-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9780203380437

Oldenburg, V.T. (1990). Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India, Feminist Studies, Speaking for Others/Speaking for Self: Women of Color, 16(2), pp. 259–287. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177850

Thomas, S. (2019). The Women’s Wall in Kerala, India, and Brahmanical Patriarchy. Feminist Studies, 45(1), p.253. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.45.1.0253 (Accessed: 9 January 2022).

Vadkinniyil, D. (2019). Mahishi’s Rage Communitas and Protests at Sabarimala. Anthropology Today, 35(5), pp.16–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12529

Venkatesan, J. (2018). 41-day penance indirect way to debar women from visiting Sabarimala: SC. Deccan Chronicle. Available at: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/190718/41-day- penanceindirect-way-of-stopping-women-visit-sabarimala-temple.html (Accessed: 4 January 2022).

Envisioning a Cultivation: Migration ThroughAnticolonial Archives and Rememories

By Estefania Padilla, Mexico and Switzerland Introduction

Throughout most of my academic journey, choosing a topic and a methodology represented two very different and rarely intertwined processes of writing apaper. The overarching topic of my research was always chosen by me, as an all-knowing Western student, while the methods applied were mostly determined, at later stage, by time constraints, funding limits, or credit guidelines of the academicinstitution Iwas partof. This division meant that,as themain goal of any written work was to produce knowledge and to benefit my academic career, the research was always conducted regardless of the methods used and the impact they had,. Thus, the methodology applied represented a means to an end, a tool that allowed for the extraction of knowledge from other communities for my personal benefit and that of my university. Today, as I question knowledge production and aim for what Rodriguez-Castro (2020) refers to as knowledge cultivation, the methods and approaches I incorporate are not separated from my questioning journey but are weaved into the praxis that frames my research.

My thesis will seek to address the epistemic erasure of Salvadorian migrant women in Mexico. The thesis will analyse the way in which Mexico and Mexicaness is constructed through the historical marginalisation of specific migrant feminine bodies and their (her)stories. More importantly, it will look at the ways in which women resist this epistemic erasure through the creation of anti-colonial archives and the sharing of rememories. The main research question is: In what ways are the (her)stories of non-white feminine Salvadorian immigrant bodies preserved and erased during the construction of a heterogenous Mexican state?

This paper seeks to explain the ontological, epistemological and methodological approaches that ground the thesis by answering the question: Why have I chosen anticolonial archive and rememory as the methodological approaches of my thesis? My goal is to take the reader through the thought process that lead me to anticolonial archives and rememories. This work will be divided into three different yet very related sections, each answering its own subquestion. The first section will start by stating the importance of the overarching decolonial approach taken by the research. The second section is concerned with the process of anticolonial archiving as an embodied experience that depends on human connections, and which allows for a continuum between the past and the present. Finally, the paper will address the concept of rememory as fragmented memories, how they are connected to anticolonial archiving, as well as how they are often forgotten due to the dominant conception of migration as a geographical movement of people.

The Starting Point: Why a decolonial approach to (this) research?

Within decolonial research, it is possible to observe distinct approaches to the process of knowledge cultivation. As opposed to knowledge production, which prioritises individualism and extractivism, knowledge cultivation aims for the co-construction and sharing of knowledge (Rodriguez Castro, 2021). Unfortunately, the cultivation done by the Salvadorian community in the context of mobility is often forgotten Thus, in my final Master’s thesis, I have opted for two specific methodologies/approaches within a decolonial praxis that focus on knowledge cultivation in the context of migration and allow for the co-construction of knowledge: anticolonial archive and rememories. However, before focusing on the

particularities of anticolonial archiving and rememories, it is important to identify the possibilities within decolonial research on migration. This first section of the paper will expand on the overarching decolonial approach I seek to take by answering the question: Why a decolonial approach to (this) research?

Borders as colonial practices

One of the main reasons I have opted for a decolonial approach when researching migration is to highlight the often-forgotten link between migration, the colonial wound, and modernity. Decolonial thought takes the commonality of a shared colonial wound as a starting point for its practices (Quijano, 1992). The shared colonial wound inflicted in what today is called Latin America includes the creation and control of institutionalised borders that define the countries which compose the once colonised continent. 1. How does our perception of migration change when we contextualise borders as products of colonialism and modernity?

Bhambra (2018) points out that academia often fails to take into consideration the historical context during which the notion and discourse of a nation-state was developed (namely, during colonisation and the imperial expansion of the West). Nation-states were a notion developed by the West, for the West, and to benefit the West. She argues that this omission in academia results in the artificial separation between the constitutive state and the imperial state which offers an incomplete perception of history and social phenoma. Inspired by Bhambra (2018), I am now unable to look at migration in Latin America without recognising the colonial and imperial frameworks that denote the flux of communities and individuals based on imposed borders and nation-states. In other words, as migration today is mainly perceived as the crossing of borders of nation-states that were defined during the colonial era, I believe it is important to take into consideration the role these borders (and their study) play in the colonial matrix of power.

The (study of) migration within countries that bear the colonial wound should, thus, be addressed through a decolonial lens. Failing to recognise the fact that borders stem from a colonial past contributes to the naturalisation of nation-sates. Consequently, there is a reinforcement of the epistemic privilege of the West as both enunciator and enunciated (Mignolo, 2010). My thesis touches upon migration between countries that share a colonial wound (Mexico and El Salvador). To avoid engaging in the epistemic marginalisation I seek to call out, it is crucial to properly contextualise migration and highlight the colonial past of both nation-states through the use of a decolonial approach.

Going beyond post-colonialism

As I explored the importance of highlighting the link between the colonial past of Latin America and the migration that takes place within the continent, I wondered if I had taken a post-colonial approach rather than a decolonial approach. In fact, a post-colonial approach to migration identifies the underlying effect that colonialism had on spatial practices that link former colonies and/to former colonial empires (Mains et al., 2013). However, mapping postcolonial relations between the geographies of the North and the South is not the goal of my thesis for two main reasons. Firstly, simply enunciating the problems of migration in the world would entail that I, as a student in a Western university, am an all-knowing subject that “maps the world and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for them” (Mignolo, 2010). Assuming the position of a detached and untouched researcher implies reproducing Western epistemic hegemony. Decolonial research, unlike post-colonial research, allows for the recognition that research “does not exist outside of trajectories of thought and action but firmly within” (Patel, 2016). In other words, decolonial research recognises the

limitsandimpossibilitiesofresearch.Thisisparticularlyimportantformeas aMexicanwhitemestizawhodirectlyorindirectlybenefits from theunequal powerrelations ofnation-building and coloniality in Mexico (Rodriguez-Castro, 2020).

Secondly, although my thesis seeks to contextualise migration within the colonial framework that imposes nation-states, I do not want to limit migration to the crossing of borders and colonialism, as it would place the central focus on Western heterogeneity and thus ignore and marginalise migrant’s experiences, practices of resistance and creation of liberated spaces (Esteva, 2013). Decolonial thought, unlike post-colonial thought, encourages the questioning of the established epistemological hierarchies that place Western ontologies as superior while also encourages a change through practiced resurgence and re-existence that displaces the ‘Western rationality as the only framework” (Walsh, 2018). A decolonial approach to migration recognises the effects of colonialism while also allowing for the exploration of new possibilities that do not focus solely on relations of oppression and marginalisation.

So, why decolonial research? In sum, a decolonial approach to migration is crucial due to the link between borders and the colonial past of both Mexico and Al Salvador. In fact, approaching borders though a decolonial lens enables a deeper understanding of the role that nation-states play in migration. In addition, decolonial research, as opposed to post-colonial research, encourages the creation of new possibilities (co-construction, practices of resistance, etc.) without ignoring the impossibilities of research (the influence of modernity in education, the bias of the researcher, etc.).

Herstories and stories: Why anticolonial archive (as the main approach of the thesis)?

My thesis seeks to analyse the historical marginalisation of Salvadorian migrant women in Mexico. This interest in the historical aspect of this erasure does not mean that the paper will focus on solely in the past, as this would reinforce the dominant perception of the past and the present as mutually exclusive. Thus, the main methodology that will be used in the RP is that of anticolonial archival, as it allows for a clear connection between the past and the present while also highlighting the role people play in its creation. The following section will give an overview of what an anticolonial archive entails as well by answering the question: Why anticolonial archive (as the main approach of the thesis)?

People and communities as curators

Due to the fact that an anticolonial archive “[c]annot be found neatly compiled within a set of document boxes housed within a specificities institution” (Kamola, 2017), I have found that seeking a strict definition of what an anticolonial archive is results in a counterintuitive and counterproductive form of approaching the organic process of curation, networking and resistance that builds an anticolonial archive’s foundation. Thus, to understand it and the role it plays, it is perhaps more useful to look at who makes an anticolonial archive rather than what makes an anticolonial archive. It is equally important to contrast how this differentiates an anticolonial archive from a hegemonical archive that installs a “set of discursive practices that allow certain statements to be made while foreclosing other possibilities” (Taoua, 2003). Extensive literature has addressed the historical role Mexico plays as a migration corridor to the United States. Much has been discussed on the number of migrants that travel this route that connects Central America to the United States (Mata-Codesal, 2020; Mendeley, 2014; Infante et al., 2012). However, much less has been said on the immigrant Latin American community residing within Mexico. In the rare cases where this is addressed, little

attention is given to the migrants themselves, as their voices are suppressed by a discourse that assumes they are a monolithic group of sufferers that “drag out of their territories social evils such as insecurity, drug trafficking, prostitution and alcoholism” (Campos, 2016)2. This lack of representation (and misrepresentation) highlights the main shortcomings of nonanticolonial curation: erasure.

One of the most defining aspects of an anticolonial archive, and the main reason I chosethis methodology, is thefocus it places onpeopleandhow theypartakein the communal creation of an anticolonial archive. As opposed to a hegemonical archive that is defined by what it includes and excludes, an anticolonial archive is concerned with forming a common project though collaboration within a community (Kamola, 2017). In fact, a hegemonical colonial archive focuses on the preservation of Western epistemologies and knowledge, while an anticolonial archive is centred around people as well as their diverse connections and their cooperation. In other words, an anticolonial archive can be perceived a set of relations that we expressed and consolidated through the communal location, relocation and dislocation of ‘texts, ideas, structures, music, images, and the like” (Kamola, 2017).

Zeffiro and Hogan (2015) state that when it comes to anticolonial archives, archiving is the by-product of the networking that takes pace during curation. In this context, curation refers not to the categorising of documents, but the process of unveiling and forming new relations that make an anticolonial archive. There is an emphasis on community-building through sharing histories. This way, the archive takes the form of people and interactions. At its core, an anticolonial archive is a community “engaged in the political struggles against colonial powers” (Kamola, 2017). It is an embodied community not only in the sense that it is curated by people, but also in the way practices are articulated into material forms that are then curated (Zeffiro & Hogan, 2015). In fact, an anticolonial archive is a community curating its own history.

An embodied archive allows a population to undo discourses promoted by an authoritative hegemonical archive. Casimir (2020) explores the construction of colonised communities as sufferer and victims of their situations. He argues that when marginalised and conquered communities tell their own story, they have the potential to reinstall themselves “in their roles as agents” (Casimir, 2020). An anticolonial archival method highlights the communities’ agency and their capacity to tell and own their stories in order to counteract the official history compiled within a dominant hegemonic archive.

Curation through time and space

Unlike a hegemonical archive that can be found between the walls of an institutional building, an anticolonial archive is not static in space or in time. It does not have a temporal or spatial beginning and ending, as it is in constant devolvement and flux (Zeffiro & Hogan, 2015). This continuity includes not only the anticolonial archive itself (texts, music, art etc.) but also the process of its creation. In fact, curating an anticolonial archive is a continued exercise of resistance that extends beyond an official state institution. This chacteristic stems from the interactions that form an anticolonial archive. As these interactions are not constrained to a particular time and/or space, neither is an anticolonial archive.

In a hegemonic approach to archives, those who contribute to the curation of archives (normally individuals with a strong specialised academic background) are not necessarily thosewhowillbenefitfromthearchive.3 Infact,thereisaclearspatio-temporaldividebetween the individuals who curate a hegemonic archive and those who gain from its creation. In an anticolonial archive this division is blurred as the main goal is the self-preservation of the community that forms the archives (Zeffiro & Hogan, 2015). In other words, since the readers and the writers of an anticolonial archive are the same people, an anticolonial archive goes beyond the boundaries of time and space that define hegemonical archiving. The benefits of

an anticolonial archive are generational and are not contained within a specific geographical place.

An anticolonial archive is not an engagement to the past but a way to discuss the present through the past and the past through the present. It is an interaction between historical locations, present moments and future possibilities (Kamola, 2017). It allows for a “reorganisation of archives following parameters other than the original order, […] such as by geography or theme” (Pattikawa, 2021). In the context of research on migration, it represents the possibility of creating a new emphasis that goes beyond the common unidimensional approach to migration as a temporally/geographically bound phenomenon. Why anticolonial archive as the main approach of my thesis? In sum, an anticolonial archive emphasises the role played by people in the construction of histories. It allows for a critique and provides an alternative to the dominant hegemonical archive concept which promotesstereotypes and depicts migrants as passiveindividuals. It is made bythecommunity and for the community, without being restricted by time and space. When it comes to the epistemic erasure of communities in the context of migration, it is crucial to go beyond the spatial/temporal limited boundaries that often frame a hegemonical archive.

(M)others and memories: Why Rhee’s rememories?

Usted no me conoce, pero yo a usted sí. Usted mi mirada nunca vio, pero yo veo la suya en su herma. Usted mi risa nunca escuchó, pero yo escucho la suya escapar la boca de mi tía. Usted nunca me cantó, pero yo de mi padre oí salir sus melodías. Usted no me conoció, pero yo a usted la reconozco todos los días.

This part of the paper diverges from the previous in structure and objective. It will not only explain why I chose rememories as one of the approaches of my thesis but it will also expand on why anticolonial archive and rememories are inherently intertwined with each other and how they can work together. Moreover, as the notion of rememories is directly linked to the reason I chose to focus on the erasure of migrant women from El Salvador, this section will alternate between an explanation of the methodology and my own/family’s/community’s rememories.Following, Wilson’s(2008)approachto relationality,Iwill expandon my history so “that you know a lot more about me before you can begin to understand my work.” (p.12).

Archiving (and) rememories

My father’s mother was a Salvadorian woman that migrated in her early twenties to Mexico City. Before migrating to Mexico she was a student activist during very unstable times marked byaviolentmilitarydictatorshipinElSalvadorand wasunderconstantthreat.Once,myfather once told me that my great grandma had to burn all of her daughter’s books because the police were going to raid their house in El Salvador. Owning certain books or writings about particular topics was enough to be incriminated, so the decision was made quite easily, and all the books were burned in the house’s backyard.

In the dominant discourse, the written mode of preserving knowledge is considered to be the best and most efficient way to transmit knowledge across time and borders. In fact, writing is the “condition for [knowledge] to be considered rigorous and monumental” (Boaventura, 2018). However, it is important to question, for whom is this efficient? Who can transmit this form of knowledge? Who enables or hinders the transition of written knowledge? In the context of migration, we can ask ourselves: if knowledge and histories are transmitted

and preserved in books, what happens to thosewhocannot taketheirbooks acrosstheborders? What happens to those who rely on the vernacular?

Estrada (2021), describes memories and emotions as crucial methods of transmitting and accessing knowledge among a community, including the migrant community. Part of the epistemic erasure endured by marginalised communities comes from the delegitimisation of the vernacular, the emotional and the spiritual. As the topic of my thesis is the epistemological erasure of migrants, analysing the role memories play in the self-preservation of migrant communitiesthatcannot(ordonotwishto)relyonthewrittenexpressionofhistoryisacrucial aspect of the research. Thus, the concept of (re)memories will be introduce along with anticolonial archives.

Kamola (2017) highlights the embodied characteristic of anticolonial archives, approaching non-hegemonical archives as (re)memories. She states that “looking back can also be understood as archiving” (Kamola, 2017). In fact, similarly to an anticolonial archive, (re)memories go beyond the borders of physical or temporal frameworks and require interaction to exist. It is thus possible to perceive memories as anticolonial practices perceived in everyday life (Salem, 2020).

Some (re)memories of (m)others

Rememories, as described by Rhee (2021), are the remaining fractured memories of people/places/things that do not hold the same physical space as those that remember them. Rheestatesthat“whoweareistheworkofrememory,adifferent wayofbeing/knowing/doing that recollects our ghostly connections, relations and connectivity across geographies, culture, time and languages” (p. 20). As I read her text, I often wondered what the difference between a memory and a rememory was. In broad terms, I would interpret rememory as the act of connecting and weaving memories with other memories, people, places, spaces and times.

My grandmother died of cancer before I had a chance to meet her. However, despite never having known her I constantly “bump into her rememory” (Rhee, 2021). These rememories I bump into are constructed by the individuals that connect(ed), the loved ones we share(d) in the physical world. These rememories are a communal collection of memories that my family has shared with me, and that we have interchanged among ourselves thought the years. We communicate, connect and learn through them. Yourgrandmotherusedtolovethis song. This is where we used to live when your grandmother was alive. This recipe was your grandmother’s. Rememories, like anticolonial archives, highlight the present not as “a transition or gap between the past and the future but as a rapture that always carries the possibility free” (Bhattacharya, 2021).

About a year ago, I bumped into my grandmother’s (re)memory when I accidentally found out that my Nahuatl teacher had also taught her Nahuatl years before I was born.4 Suddenly, my present and my grandmother’s past were connected. Then was now and now became then, even though I was not present then (Rhee, 2021). Rememories allow for a deeper comprehension of the relationship that a community shares with the land and the people that remain separated in time and space. It challenges the notion of geographical disassociation as the ultimate separation between land and people.

As I shared with my father how I bumped into my grandmother’s (re)memory, I saw howhebumpedintothesame(re)memory as thewords cameout my mouth.“Ihadcompletely forgotten my mother leant Nahuatl” he commented. Just as the creation of these rememories stems from us, their suppression does as well. Although rememories allow for an exploration of other sensibilities and feelings (a task that would be impossible with dominant methodologies), Bhattacharya (2021) invites us to question whose sensibilities have been counted and which ones count. When does a mother become an Other? When are mothers dismissed by knowledge and history?

In sum, incorporating rememories into my framework would allow for the exploration ofnon-dominant forms of knowledgetransmissionandcultivation such as orality andfeelings. In addition, similar to anticolonial archives, it goes beyond the spatio-temporal divides that frame migration. Finally, it defies otherisation of mothers and the exclusion of female sensibilities.

Some concluding thoughts

My thesis will touch upon the epistemic erasure of immigrant bodies. More specifically it will analyse the ways in which the (her)stories of non-white feminine Salvadorian immigrant bodies are preserved and erased during the construction of a heterogenous Mexican state. I have opted to analyse this through an anticolonial lens to engage with epistemic disobedience and to avoid engaging in the erasure I seek to call out.

The research methodologies/approaches that will be implemented in the thesis are those of anticolonial archive and rememories. Both approaches work beyond the spatiotemporal framework that often reduces migration to the crossing of time-bound boarders. In addition, there is an emphasis on community building and knowledge cultivation that is often forgotten in the analysis of migration. Moreover, both approaches question the otherisation of marginalised communities, namely women and migrants.

Finally, I would like to conclude that the goal of my thesis is not to create an anticolonial archive nor to introduce the rememories of a community into academia. My main goal is to contribute knowledge cultivation and to tejer lazos or weaving ties while also exploring the new ways and working within the (im)possibilities of academia.

References

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Revolution from Within: Placing Decolonial Healing at the Center of Political Struggle

By Rachelle Sartori, USA Introduction

When designing political strategy and a vision for change, social movements have many intellectual traditions and historical examples to draw from. Movements seek to win revolutionary battles by organising the grassroots, identifying and developing leaders, launching media campaigns, and executing public actions (Cycles, 2022). While these are essential components of movement building, this essay argues that decolonial healing must be prioritised in all political struggles. Using debates from Marxist political economy and decoloniality, this essay will examine how structural oppression impacts human bodies, keeping us sick and marginalised. It will then dissect why decolonial healing must be central to the political struggles within revolutionary movement building, and how we can integrate restorative practices into our lives and our organising.

Why we struggle – a structural framing

Prior to examining why movement building strategy must place healing at the centre of political struggle, it is essential to understand the problem at hand and the structural roots of our collective somatic trauma. “Systemic inflammation [in the body] and its accompanying diseases have increased dramatically across industrialised societies” (Marya and Patel, 2021), and yet, instead of providing a sophisticated, root cause explanation of chronic and communicable disease, mainstream rhetoric focuses primarily on behaviours and lifestyle factors (ibid). Doctors blame the individual, an “indocile, undisciplined patient…the attitude of medical personnel [departs from] a hegemonic epistemology of the body” (Ureña, 2019). However, the disease within our bodies cannot be separated from our political, social, and economic environments, our ancestral history, and the power relationships within which we are embedded (Marya and Patel, 2021). Marxist political economy illuminates one aspect of this structural analysis by explaining the dialectical relationship between the bourgeoisie class which controls the state and owns all productive forces, and the proletariat which is forced to sell their labour power to survive (Marx and Engels, 1987). In this exploitive relationship, the bourgeoisie aims to maximise profits by cutting labour and production costs (ibid). Thus, they entrap the worker in brutal conditions, extending the working day beyond humane hours, and appropriating every ounce of their existence for work, while also forcing the proletariat into crowded, unsanitary, deteriorating living environments (Sartori, 2022). This inflicts deep somatic consequences, as these stressful experiences are held in the body as trauma (LePera, 2021) producing chronic disease, addiction, fragmented family relations, intellectual and emotional depreciation, and ultimately death by structural exploitation and oppression (Sartori, 2022).

Other Marxist scholars and practitioners have augmented this explanation on the relationship between structural oppression and somatic consequences. One such practitioner was Rudolf Virchow, one of the founders of modern immunology. Virchow was a citizen of Berlin during the Revolutions of 1848, and yet also a participant in the uprisings against the European states (Marya and Patel, 2021). As a physician, Virchow witnessed famine, disease, and catastrophic conditions for the urban poor, and he was one of the greatest influencers in theorising that diseaseisnot generatedfrom withinthebody,butratherit isthebody’s reaction to an external stimulus (Marya and Patel, 2021). He spoke out against racial hierarchy and

highlighted the importance of social conditions, emphasising that “oppression would lead to more pronounced manifestations of disease, and justice would enable healing” (Marya and Patel, 2021).

While orthodox Marxist tradition highlights many connections between oppressive structures like capitalism and somatic trauma, it has less to offer when examining the consequences of other forms of oppression, such as patriarchy or white supremacy. Feminist Marxists like Maria Mies and Silvia Federici touch on this by connecting primitive accumulation to the differentiated working class, noting that the exploitation of workers for capital accumulation did not occur evenly but rather within hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, and age (Federici, 2005). Nonetheless, decoloniality brings forward a critique to orthodox Marxist analysis. While this tradition primarily explains inequality through social and class relations, recognising that racialised and gendered subjects are strategically and disproportionately exploited for the purpose of capitalist expansion (Marx, 1999), decoloniality roots the debate further, arguing that race, gender, and sexuality are man-made categories which were created through violent processes of colonisation, for the purpose of delineating which bodies are natural and at the top of the social, economic, and political order (Lugones, 2010). For colonised people and particularly women, oppression has always been intersectional,affectingindividualsin acumulativewaybasedontheirvarioussocialidentities (Lugones, 2011). Thus, decolonial thought shows whose bodies are mostly greatly impacted by structural oppression, by whom, through what origins, and for what purpose.

When exploring the structural roots of somatic trauma, Marxism and decoloniality have another key distinction. While Marxism is material in its essence, emphasising trauma and disease that forms in the body due to overwork and other challenging material conditions, decoloniality departs from the colonial wound, which is an “embodied, affective, and epistemological injury” (Ureña, 2019). Instead of centering the material, decolonial scholars begin with the epistemic domain and the coloniality of power which controls knowledge and determines what ways of being, doing, and living are acceptable by the colonial gaze (NdlovuGatsheni, 2020, p.1), again, rooting in the phenomena which created material conditions in the first place. Categorical and hierarchical colonial logics still reign today and inflict epistemic violence by delineating the boundaries of whose bodies are healthy and whose are abnormal (Trejo Méndez, 2021). Particular bodies, especially the “racialised-feminine” are seen as the ‘other’ and as less than human (Trejo Méndez, 2021). This process is operationalised in “medical praxis, research, and knowledge [which] reproduces dehumanisation, their legitimacy andcontrol of truth foundedonthe assumedsuperiorityofits logics ofelimination” (Trejo Méndez, 2021). While Marxist tradition illuminates how oppressive structures like capitalism make us sick in more obvious ways such as through brute force, overwork, and extraction, the colonial wound departs from the insidious epistemic position; as an individual is denied their very personhood, they internalise this subjugation, which steadily degrades the body, mind, and spirit.

Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and activist born in the French colony Martinique, combined revolutionary and decolonial theory for integrated praxis, and he worked as head of the psychiatry department at Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, which was French territory at the time. He observed this process of internalising oppression very clearly with his patients who regularly faced the epistemic and thus ontological erasure of their identities under the French occupation (Keller, 2007). While many of his colleagues observed maladaptive behaviours in their patients, they attributed these symptoms to be part of the innate wiring of the individuals, deeming them “as an inherent primitive and an incipient criminal” ((Keller, 2007, p. 827). Fanon argued that the “generalised malaise they saw as common among North African immigrants…was a somatic manifestation of psychological pressures placed on a marginalised population suffering in a contemptuous host society (Keller, 2007). He “located the origins of Algerian violence in the mechanics of colonial society and in the psychological

formation of the revolutionary subject…[arguing] that it was the colonialist’s aggression that bred concomitant behaviour in the individual” (Keller, 2007, p. 828). He wrote a series of case studies which depict the shocking wounds inflicted onto colonised peoples, as well as their “psychotic reactions,” including a person’s “entire personality [being] definitively dislocated” (Fanon, 1963).

Decoloniality brings a sharp critique to orthodox Marxist understanding of how structural oppression inflicts somatic trauma, by extending beyond class to not only include other lenses of oppression such as race, gender, or sexuality, but also by revealing how these social constructs were built in the first place, as part of violent colonising processes, deeming certain racialised, gendered, and non-heteronormative bodies as nonhuman, thus reducing them to machines of capital accumulation. Also, while Marxist tradition departs from the material realm, focusing on physical conditions and overt exploitation of working-class labour as well as the extraction of women’s social reproductive labour (Federici, 2018), decoloniality extends beyond the material, departing from the epistemic and embodied colonial wound, where knowledge is created and internalised. Here, it is understood how hegemonic forces slowly and deliberately dehumanise and destroy colonised peoples’ sense of personhood, installing violence among colonised societies while simultaneously erasing all traces of life and identity that existed there previously (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020). Through this process, individuals somatically internalise their marginalisation, suffering deep consequences in their bodies. While there are these key distinctions between Marxist and decolonial analysis on the impacts of structural oppression, they share an important similarity, namely that they both reveal the indelible embodied consequences of oppression. As structures like capitalism, coloniality, white supremacy, and patriarchy put more pressure on humans and environments, health will inevitably suffer; and yet, structural oppression is nearly invisible in mainstream healthcare, media, and narrative.

Although not explicitly Marxist or decolonial, there are numerous contemporary scholars, practitioners, and activists who are speaking out about the connections between structural oppression and somatic trauma. One example is Staci Haines, founder of Generative Somatics and author of The Politics ofTrauma. In her work, she presents a model called Sites of Shaping/Sites of Change, where she discusses how our conditioning and particularly our pains and our privileges are largely determined by sites outside of ourselves, namely family and intimate networks, community, institutions, social norms and historical forces, and finally spirit and landscape (Haines, 2021). “Hungarian-Canadian psychiatrist Gabor Maté goes as far to say that childhood trauma is the number one root cause of all forms of chronic illness” (PainSocietyofAlberta).Intheirbook Inflamed:DeepMedicineandtheAnatomyofInjustice, Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel discuss the forces of capitalism, colonialism, and supremacism, and how these complexes inflict harm to the human body, providing case studies from around the world which connect structural oppression to disease in the eight major organ systems (2021). They emphasise that it is part of the system’s design that certain bodies experience health crises more than others, and that this points to “questions about power, injustice, and inequity…bound in modern medicine within questions of colonialism” (Marya and Patel). Finally, Marya and Patel connect to the everyday lived experiences of people, noting that, “Experiencing daily trauma at the hands of law enforcement, acute poverty, hunger, discrimination, forced displacement, and disproportionate exposure to toxins – it all makes people sick” (Marya and Patel). A final example is the work of Resmaa Menakem, a Black therapist and somatic abolitionist who draws connections between racism and white supremacy and how these forces are held and maintained through all peoples’ bodies and nervous systems, highlighting the historical roots of slavery and the ongoing structural oppression of police brutality on Black and Brown people (Menakem, 2017). Through the work of these contemporary authors as well as Marxist and decolonial analysis, it is clear that the inflammation and psychosomatic pains that live within each of us are inextricably linked

to the oppressive structures within which we are embedded. Recognising this connection is the first step towards understanding why social movements must place healing at the centre of political struggle.

Rationale – the power of somatic healing

Orthodox Marxist tradition offers a robust explanation for how capitalist exploitation makes people sick and marginalised. However, the tradition struggles to go beyond this, to explain the implications of this harm and how it may affect social organisation, relations, or social movements. One Marxist scholar and psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, managed to expound on the repercussions of structural oppression through his exploration of sexuality and family dynamics. “In his work, he made key theorisations, such as the connection between the patriarchal family and peoples’ internalised power relations which impact their political behaviour” (Sartori, 2022c). He hypothesised that as people internalise the power relations in their hegemonic nuclear family, they unconsciously seek to replicate this authoritarian leadership in society, thus highlighting potential political implications of this phenomenon. While this explanation provides new insights, it still falls short of illuminating the root causes which create the patriarchal, authoritarian nuclear family in the first place and how this may contribute to ongoing oppression. Thus, decoloniality provides a strong critique, as a decolonial history illuminates how colonial powers created, idealised, and universalised the nuclear family as the best form of social organisation, propped up by the nation state to facilitate capitalist life and to further isolate bodies that did not fit this dominant hegemon (McEwen, 2021).

Decolonial scholar María Lugones brings knowledge into how the colonial gaze on family, as well as race, gender, sexuality, and class via the coloniality of power can further perpetuate harm by making us instruments of oppression. She speaks about her own internalised coloniality when she writes, “My body has come to know and experience the dominant gaze in different ‘worlds’…the ones where I am dehumanised and the ones where I have failed to delink from such gaze, therefore reproducing it or being unable to challenge it” (Trejo Méndez, 2021). Here, she pinpoints the first key reason for movements to place healing at the centre of political struggle: because by living within structures of oppression, our bodies become attuned to reproduce this oppression, keeping it alive. This can be observed at a cellular level, as trauma inflicted onto us interpersonally, historically/ancestrally, structurally, or through social norms is remembered in the nervous system (Menakem, 2017) As humans are wired for survival, the nervous system will then develop adaptation strategies to cope with this pain and dysregulation held in the body (Haines, 2021, p. 96). Oftentimes, the nervous system becomes calibrated to reproduce the original trauma in an attempt to resolve it. “However,the attempt to reenact the event simply repeats, re-inflicts, anddeepens the trauma” (Menakem, 2017).

When humans become somatically calibrated to reproduce structural oppression, this can manifest in a variety of ways with numerous different political consequences for social movements. One of the more tangible ways we reproduce trauma and oppression is in our dailyinterpersonalinteractions.Dr.RaeJohnson, authorof EmbodiedSocialJustice, discusses the concept of microaggressions and how by living amongst power-over structures in society, we internalise the mechanisms of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonial capitalism. She and others conducted a study and depicted how we (particularly white and male bodies) reproduce these biases in our interactions with people whose racialised and gendered bodies are demonised by hegemonic forces (Johnson, et.al., 2018). Because much of communication occurs in the embodied dimension and signals are transmitted through nonverbal cues like gestures, eye movement, and use of space (Johnson, et.al., 2018), we cannot refrain from committing microaggressions by making a cognitive choice to do so, as these behaviours are

not conscious to the rational mind. Instead, embodied change and embodied healing must be done to unwind the patterns of supremacy and domination ingrained within us, which will in turn allow unconscious behaviours like microaggressions to shift (Haines, 2021). This is of great relevance for social movements, because without somatic rewiring, our bodies will be attuned to recreating the very structures, values, and relationships we are organising to dismantle, thus inhibiting our activism and clouding our vision for transformation. Staci Haines broadens the discussion on reproducing structural oppression and power-over dynamics by taking it beyond the interpersonal sphere. She states how the United States is founded on power-over structures through settler colonialism and Christian nationalism, and howourbodiesreproduce thesestructures onlargerscales as well,such as throughcompulsive wealth accumulation and economic exploitation (Haines, 2021, p. 390), human’s desire to have power and control over earth, seeing earth as an object without its own agency, as well as through our pull towards private property and the commodification and private ownership of natural resources (Haines, 2021).

Although current literature is less robust, links can also be observed between somatic trauma and right-wing populism. In the last several years, there has been a resurgence of altright political leaders as well as conservative narratives which scapegoat poor and marginalised people for social problems which have structural roots (Frankel, 2015). Electoral maps show that while low-income voters turned out more for Democratic candidates in the 2016 election, support for Donald Trump by these same voters increased by 16 points from the previous election cycle with Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate, despite Trump’s demonisation of the poor and threats to cut essential public programs (Slevin, 2016). While there are competing explanations which aim to rationalise this phenomenon, trauma is rarely discussed. Inhis article TheTraumaticBasisfortheResurgenceofRight-WingPoliticsAmong Working Americans, Jay Frankel integrates Ferenczi psychology, trauma, and political behaviour (Frankel, 2015). Frankel discusses how right-wing political leaders prey on and exploit people’s traumatic experiences when they speak about deporting immigrants who are allegedly stealing American jobs or cracking down on criminal behaviour and public safety. These promises speak to and provide easy answers for people’s deepest fears, feelings of shame, and everyday struggles, as many rural communities are economically and socially decimated. Frankel shares how through psychoanalytic trauma theory we can see that support for these political candidates may be connected to a “traumatic reaction [called] identification with the aggressor…[where] they would subordinate themselves to automata to the will of the aggressor” to seek comfort and safety (ibid). This is an essential consideration for revolutionarymovementsthatareworkingtounite thegrassroots forstructuraltransformation. Instead of churning out numbers of people at public actions, deep organising which creates space for people to process their trauma, fears, and shame is needed to somatically unwind outdated stories within ourselves and make space for renewed political analysis. Another political implication of trauma and structural oppression revolves around white fragility. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialised Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem coins the term “white-body supremacy” and highlights how feelings of power, entitlement, and superiority are held in white bodies, historically conditioned that way dating back to settler colonialism and slavery (2017). Additionally, in her book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo argues how covert, subconscious forms of racism stem from white people fearing the loss of their power and privilege in society (2018). Thus, to build intersectional movements across lines of division like race, gender, class, or sexual orientation, social movements must center healing to unravel learned patterns of superiority and inferiority and build coalition across the intersectional oppressions that people face. Finally, structural oppression causes individuals to develop chronic disease, struggle with addiction, or face challenges within interpersonal relationships due to past and ongoing trauma. As people are occupied by these difficult somatic

maladaptations to stress, they become less capable of being organised for a revolutionary movement, as their daily existence is usurped by dealing with survival emergencies. Revolutionary movements must centre healing and care to combat sickness which keeps us marginalised as we organise toward a better future.

Marxist analysis explains how not only capitalist exploitation harms our bodies, but also how this harm is then internalised and perpetuated in society. Decoloniality takes this claim further by exposing the colonial roots of our harm and by arguing how human bodies then become instruments of oppression, as we recreate our experiences in our interpersonal relationships, our social organisation, our voting behaviour, and our contributions to ongoing white supremacy. One strand of decoloniality, Africana phenomenological social analysis, summarises this well by recognising “both the impact of the social world on the emergence of meaning and human identities, and how individual situations relate to the development and preservation of social and political institutions. The influence between self and society, in other words, moves in both directions” (Ureña, 2019). While humans are shaped by the structural oppression within which we are embedded, our internalisation of this process in the body simultaneously shapes society, which has stark political consequences. If social movements aim to birth a new future, we must place healing at the centre of political struggle, so that we may recover from our trauma and sickness and break the profound energetic connection which oppression holds in our bodies.

How do we do it? – A decolonial lens for revolutionary healing

OrthodoxMarxisttraditionpointstoorganisingarevolutionaryclasstoseizeproductiveforces as the ultimate path to liberation (Marx and Engels, 1987). However, given class dispossession, “how can we organise people who are diseased, addicted, and exhausted?” (Sartori, 2022). Marxism fails to offerguidanceon organisingpraxis in thecontextofworkers’ daily struggles. Meanwhile, decolonial indigenous scholar Lorena Cabnal asserts that “healing [is] a cosmic-political path for liberation and emancipation of bodies and the earth” – naming healing as praxis, or healing as the political organising work itself (Trejo Méndez, 2021). While Marxism fails to explore the ‘how to’ of healing, decolonial analysis provides ample insight into what revolutionary healing might look like.

Historically, colonial medicine has hardly been about healing but rather an operation of power which “served as an instrument of surveillance and domination” of the colonised (Keller, 2007). Many of these tendencies still pervade today, and thus, decoloniality demands that we delink from the mechanisms, logics, and institutions of Western colonial medicine to truly cultivate healing (Trejo Méndez, 2021). For example, Western medicine heavily relies on the doctor-patient hierarchy and the medicalisation, institutionalisation, and technologisation of healing. Decolonial thought offers the path of the curandera which says that “everyone is a healer [and can reclaim] the power to restore and engage in healing practices beyond institutions” (Trejo Méndez, 2021). Western colonial medicine relies on binaries like health/illness and world/body and treats health as an end goal to reach, erasing all traces of past scars and illness through biochemical interventions (Ureña, 2019, p. 1642). Meanwhile, decolonial healing honours the Nepantla, or the state of transition, the “liminal space of becoming” (Trejo Méndez, 2021) while understanding restoring the body as “inseparable from the territory, ancestors, and the community” (Trejo Méndez, 2021). Additionally, decoloniality sees there is “healing beyond health”; healing is not a place to be reached but rather a life-long journey of inquiry into the body (ibid). Caution is placed on “the medicalisation of life and institutionalisation of healing as what may prevent societies [from developing] healthy ways of coping with suffering” while decolonial healing shows that to overcome historical trauma, we must develop a shared capacity to “deal with suffering that

would require us to acknowledge pain, to feel it and grieve it” (ibid), emphasising collectivity, tenderness, and reciprocity.

Within this foundation, healing begins the moment we realise we have been colonised and become conscious of our colonial wound, or the ways in which we feel inferior (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014). “Healing is the process of delinking, or regaining [our] pride, [our] dignity, assuming [our] entire humanity in front of an un-human being that makes [us] believe [we] were abnormal [or] lesser” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014). By freeing ourselves from our own colonial wounds, we can also move towards “liberation from systems of oppression that produce and require fragmentation to remain in place” (Trejo Méndez, 2021), thus simultaneously liberating society and our world. Through this process, we begin to detach from the colonial gaze that aims to delineate the boundaries of sick and healthy, and labels certain bodies as “objects of intervention” (Trejo Méndez, 2021). I personally have undergone this process, as I am asexual and have been made invisible by the modern medical system manytimes,asnothavingsexualdesireisautomaticallypathologisedasahormonalimbalance or as some form of deficiency in bodily functioning. I have felt deep senses of worthlessness in the eyes of compulsive sexuality which vilifies nonsexual relationships. It was only through unpacking my own internalised oppression and trauma that years of chronic physical illness (seemingly unrelated to sexuality by the modern medical gaze) began to subside. I started to see beyond traditional markers of pathology to realise that the cause of my suffering was my own colonial wound and how hegemonic definitions of ‘normal’ devalued me within society. Through creative expression, building coalition, and detaching from hegemonic expectations of ‘normal,’ (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014) we can begin to reclaim our inherent value and create new knowledge grounded in our lived experience, and space for new conceptualisations of health and identity (Keller, 2007).

Conclusion

While bringing awareness to our colonial wounds, opening space for new knowledge to arise, building collectivity, and dismantling the logics of colonial medicine are all essential components of decolonial healing, Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogeny brings this story full circle. Through sociogeny, Fanon argues there is a stark relationship between self and society (Ureña, 2019), and he connects somatic healing back to the context within which it is embedded. He asserts that “the invisible wounds of coloniality cannot be healed without radical changes in politics, in medical institutions, and in narratives about the full humanity of oppressed people” (ibid, p. 1643). Somatic and structural transformation work in tandem, and we need both to be free. Thus, as we understand the trauma inflicted onto us by oppressive social structures, the ways we are conditioned to reproduce this trauma, and the political consequences of this cyclical trauma, decolonial healing allows us to break free from these chains, shining a light on our darkest corners, and placing healing at the centre of all political struggle. Instead of ranking orthodox Marxist tradition and decolonial analysis against each other, a “pluralist platform” is more effective for guiding us in how to fight these political battles (Borras, 2019). The work of Frantz Fanon is an excellent example of how to do this.

By combining revolutionary consciousness with decolonial healing praxis, we facilitate movement building which is moreresilient,nimble, and effective, placing healingat the centre and fuelling ourselves as we catalyse a new future.

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Complementing the Idea of Conservation: Between Preserving and Green Grabbing, a case

study: the Indigenous Community of Cirompang in Banten, Indonesia

By Nadia Gissma Kusumawardhani, Indonesia

Introduction

This essay is a collection of my thoughts to see how my views on the preservation of nature shifted from enthusiastic to sceptical. I was living inside the bubble of technocratic solutions as an engineer. Init, Ithought naturecould berectifiedusing technology and thatboth together could grow the economy. Asaresult,Iabandonedtheideaofpreservationasagiven.However, after a few years and influenced by my shifting interest to agrarian studies (Fairhead, Leach andScoones,2012;AstutiandMcGregor,2016;McCarthy,VelandSuraya,2012;Benjaminsen and Bryceson, 2012) and critical geography studies (Harvey, 1998; Soja, 1989; Foucault, 1982), I changed my viewpoint, becoming sceptical of preservation, and considered its relationship to green grabbing. I also started digging into ongoing practices in “neoliberal conservation” (Ojeda, 2012, p. 358), which appeared to be a state-led project in cooperation with private businesses through some environmental agendas (like ecotourism, carbon sequestration, or biodiversity conservation park).

My journey started during my undergraduate thesis on how customary values were incorporated into local land use planning of the indigenous community of Cirompang, Banten, Indonesia. During my three months fieldwork, I overheard a villager’s night patrol talking about a struggle against Gunung Halimun Salak National Park (TNGHS) authorities. The conflict started when a state-owned forestry company (Perum Perhutani III) dispossessed indigenous land and gave it a production forest (Hutan Produksi) status in 1978 with limited access to land that fulfilled livelihood for the local population. The community was alsomade topay a harvesting tax of 25 percent from the total agricultural output on the claimed land by TNGHS. In 2003, the land was converted to a conservation forest because of a national park expansion plan, which further impacted the Cirompang community to access natural resources and caused deeper unrest for them. Such deals are known as ‘green grabs’ wherein environmental agendas are the core drivers for the land deals but involve restructuring rules and authority for land access (Fairhead et al., 2012).

TNGHS claimed that the agricultural activity done by the Cirompang people ruins nature preservation. However, the community’s traditional efforts are already conservationist through their customary land tenure even before Indonesia was declared as a nation. They created a zone where land could be cultivated, reserved, and stay pristine (untouchable). The land claiming process by TNGHS also contradicted the Government Regulation No.69/1996, which states that communities have the right to active participation in deciding how their land is used. The Cirompang people have been fighting against the TNGHS since 1997, and as I arrived, their struggle had almost come to an end. Atthefinalstage, theindigenouscommunity succeeded in getting their land back based on the Indonesian Environment and Forestry Ministerial Decree No. 1548/2019 which assigned a customary status of 306 hectares of land to Cirompang community. However, a feeling of restlessness persisted, especially after a number of private companies approached the community with private business propositions, most of which were supported by the regional government (Interview, 2 February 2020). The community has rejected those proposals as they are afraid that they will degrade the forest's quality and disrupt their local land tenure.

Finally, this essay will showcase the tensions that inevitably exist between state conservation and green grabs, in which “the notions of ‘green’ (what and who is green or not)

come to be defined and mobilised in particular ways” (Fairhead et al., 2012, p. 239). This is contrary to conservation initiatives of the indigenous community of Cirompang, which can be seen as an alternative form of nature preservation without green grabbing and its derivative impacts. This form of conservation by the community depicts a “post-growth” orientation on how enhancing wellbeing can be achieved alongside ecological transition and against growthobsessed economies (Gerber and Raina, 2018, p. 354).

A state-led conservation project and green grabs

My scepticism in conservation started with an understanding that the idea of conservation cannot be separated from its relation to capital accumulation. Thinkingofenvironmentalcrises inonlyecological terms is problematic since it simultaneously marks the limit to capital today (Escobar, 2007a). Capitalism has rooted its logic everywhere, and it has disintegrated relationships between nature and culture through modernity, created a duality (ibid). Therefore, the conservation proposal fallacy was created under the national park's name. It is a concept wherein we can only choose between preservation over the existing local community’s livelihood or expelling them as “the other” (ibid, p. 197). These practices have been collected in a top-down process of land-use conversion without recognising indigenous territories. It first happened in 1978 when Perum Perhutani III took over land management to be tree plantations, which benefited rich elites in timber productions but limited the local community to farm for their subsistence while steadfastly being forced to pay harvesting tax. The legal title of Perum Perhutani III in managing land showed how privatisation practices set a precondition for the commodification of land,through rights that outlined what resources could be used and by whom (Castree, 2003). Then in 2003, after a long process of extraction for agricultural productions, the deforestation crisis put pressure on Perum Perhutani III to stop the operation and convert it to conservation forest status as the expansionary TNGHS national park. However, this condition put the indigenous community in a worse position, as 56% of their land was dispossessed, thus disrupting their food sufficiency.

Pengelola Kawasan large (ha)

Total areaofCirompang’s customary land 637,501

TNGHS land claims in 2003 361,701

Total area can be accessed by communities after dispossession 275,799

Average ofland ownership (455 households) 0,6/households

Average of land ownership (1.414 persons) 0,19/person

Table 1:Land Ownership Average After Land Claims by TNGHS Source: Participatory Mapping by RMI in 2009

The data shows a significant change in the average of land ownership by indigenous peoplein Cirompang aftertheconservationagendabyTNGHS,whichlimitedtheirsubsistence practices (RMI, 2009). Capital was therefore dispossessing, as this process increased restrictions on local resources which it justified by deploying narratives of degradation (Benjaminsen and Bryceson, 2012). The new trends of green economies and climate change have further shaped political action that leads to increased governing of indigenous territories and shifts in their land uses for the desires of influential groups (McCarthy et al. 2012; Astuti and McGregor, 2016). TNGHS thus claimed land as “a disciplinary function” (Foucault, 1982, p. 361) over Cirompang’s customary territories, which served as a preliminary condition for

capital accumulation with the agenda of forest regeneration (Harvey, 1998). In my reflections I returned to Escobar (2007a) and landed on a question – to what extent can preservation be achieved in isolation from the processes of green grabbing and their dispossessions? And how can one unmask this duality as a modernist approach to balancing the interests of the environment and humans within conservation practices (Escobar, 2007a)?

Nurturing nature without exclusion: an alternative and its precondition

Theindigenous peopleof Cirompanghavebeeninhabitants oftheirareas since1873, andmost of their activities are dependent on land resources. There is a customary tenurial arrangement in spatial planning that has already established conservation initiatives. Based on their customarylaw,forestareasoftheCirompangpeoplearedistributedintothreezonesconsisting of a housing and cultivation zone, a reserve area, and a sacred/pristine forest (an untouchable area). The reserve area is a saving area that only can be used in specific amounts of increasing population and is represented by ‘customary court’ (Interview, 5 June 2019). In contrast to the reserve area, highly valued conservation initiatives lay on sacred/pristine forests, which deposit water for entire villages. This area is in the highest terrain, with wildlife also living there, so they protect the area to sustain the life of non-human nature. To this, I have seen that conservation is already a part of their culture. They hold their relation to non-human creatures as one ofintimate response-ability through their customary tenurial planning (Haraway, 2015, p. 164). By gently defamiliarising the making of kin, as not necessarily between humans but also unexpected others, they propose an alternative precondition for conservation of all living beings (Haraway, 2015, p. 161). This destroys dualist forms of modernist thinking regarding preservation, which holds that conservation practices should be done separately between nonhuman and human activities; thus, they show that resource inclusion for the land-user should also be considered.

In 2020, a son from the customary headman, Ateng, called me to give an update after victory over the state’s recognition of them as the indigenous community and their customary land certification. However, apart from such glory stories, Ateng also revealed his discouragement after several companies approached their land for business.

“We have been asked for joint business. They (private companies) are coming from various sectors such as mineral water production, ecotourism, carbon market and fruits trader. We were told that what we needed to do is provide the land. One of them asked for a leasing mechanism, and the other want us to joint their company as community partner. But we are afraid to lose our customary land again if we accept their offers, we do not believe in big money. For me, as we still have our reserve land and people can still be harvesting, In shaa Allah that is enough for us” (Personal communication, 20 January 2020)

His response reveals how the monetisation of land is not a big deal as they have sovereignty over their land, which is evidence that societies and nature have co-existed with each other (Borras and Franco, 2012). Therefore, land ownership is a precondition to have sovereignty in protecting the area where conservation is established. This is a state's responsibility to legitimise indigenous territories and not necessarily put economic investment on land and rather to reconnect land and its user relations (ibid.). Finally, it also shows how political consciousness is necessary to conservation practices, not just to respond to questions of capital accumulation, but also important to maintaining the spirit of preserving nature for matters of collective need.

Another post-growth development practice in the Global South

This case study highlights one more example of post-growth orientations in the Global South, especiallyintheecologicaltransitiontowardsconservationpracticesthataredistinctfromgreen grabs or local resource exclusion (Gerber and Raina, 2018). In disengaging from a modernist duality between society and nature, the Cirompang people’ practices put greater weight into local knowledge for producing a more humane and ecologically sustainable universe (Escobar 2007). The measurement of wealth is not dominated by huge amounts of money but rather by balancing the calculation between human needs and non-human creatures’ lives, echoing a notion of making kinship with unexpected others (Haraway, 2015). Nature preservation with green-grabbing practices is a form of capital that stabilises its spaces and practices to have preconditions for its accumulation. A facilitative nation-state that provides space for such an enclosure is a part of mainstream development by elites. It enforces particular institutional arrangements to provide all the materials in one place for growth production (Harvey, 1998, p. 95; Borras and Franco, 2012, p. 4). However, in postgrowth logics, economic-obsessed growth must be dismantled from its development machinery,thusgreengrabbingoranyotherexclusioncanbeavoidedinpreservationpractices This enables a focus on an ecological transition that highly values human-and-non-humancreatures’ intimacy in creating a peaceful space to live.

References

Astuti, R. and McGregor, A (2016) ‘Indigenous land claims or green grabs? Inclusions and exclusions within forest carbon politics in Indonesia’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(2), pp.445–466. doi:10.1080/03066150.2016.1197908

Benjaminsen, T.A. and Bryceson, I. (2012) ‘Conservation, green/blue grabbing and accumulation by dispossession in Tanzania’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2), 335–355. doi:10.1080/03066150.2012.667405

Borras jr., S.M. (Saturnino) and Franco, J.C. (Jennifer) (2012) A ‘land sovereignty’ alternative? towards a peoples’ counter-enclosure. Available at: http://repub.eur.nl/pub/38546 (Accessed: January 5, 2022)

Brockington, D. and Duffy, R. (2010). Capitalism and Conservation: The Production and Reproduction of Biodiversity Conservation. Antipode, 42(3), pp. 469–484. <doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00760>

Castree, N. (2003) ‘Commodifying what nature?’ Progress in Human Geography, 27(3), pp. 273–297. doi:10.1191/0309132503ph428oa

Escobar, A. (2007a) ‘Worlds And Knowledges Otherwise’. Cultural Studies, 21(2), pp. 179–210. doi:10.1080/09502380601162506

Escobar, A. (2007b) ‘Post-development as Concept and Social Practice’ In Exploring PostDevelopment: Theory and Practice, Problems and Perspective, pp. 18-32

Fairhead, J., Leach, M., and Scoones, I. (2012). ‘Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?’ Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), pp. 237–261. doi:10.1080/03066150.2012.671770

Foucault, M. (1982) ‘Space, Power, and Knowledge’, in James D. Faubion (ed) Power: Essential Works 1954-1984, pp. 349-364. London: Penguin.

Gerber, J.F., Raina, R. S. (2018) ‘Post-Growth in the Global South? Some Reflections from India and Bhutan’, Ecological Economics. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.02.020

Haraway, D. (2015) ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulhucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6(1), pp.159-65. doi:10.1215/22011919-3615934

Harvey, D. (1998) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. Indonesian Central Government. ‘Peraturan Pemerintah No. 69 Tahun 1996 tentang Hak dan Kewajiban, Serta Bentuk dan Tata Cara Peran Serta Masyarakat Dalam Penataan Ruang’ [Government Regulation No. 69 Year 1996 on Rights and Obligations, Technical Procedures of Society’s Participation on Spatial Planning]. (Accessed: 2 January 2022).

KLHK. ‘Keputusan Menteri Lingkungan Hidup dan Kehutanan Republik Indonesia No.1548/2019 tentang Penetapan Hutan Adat Kasepuhan Cirompang’ [Environment and Forestry Ministerial Decree No. 1548 Year 2019 on Indigenous Community of Cirompang’s Customary Forest Stipulation]. (Accessed: 2 January 2022)

McCarthy, J.F., Vel, J.A.C. and Suraya, A. (2012) ‘Trajectories of land acquisition and enclosure: development schemes, virtual land grabs, and green acquisitions in Indonesia's Outer Islands’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), pp. 521–549. doi:10.1080/03066150.2012.671768

Ojeda, D. (2012) ‘Green pretexts: Ecotourism, neoliberal conservation and land grabbing in Tayrona National Natural Park, Colombia’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), pp. 357–375. doi:10.1080/03066150.2012.658777

RMI. (2009) ‘Profil Cirompang. Dan Laporan Pemetaan Partisipatif Masyarakat Adat Cirompang’ [Cirompang’s Profile and the Participatory Mapping Report]. RMI: Bogor Soja, E. W. (1989) ‘Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory’, London: Verso.

The Hardest Stories to Tell are Your Own, but When Does a Story Truly Become Yours to Own?

By Mariya N. Khan, India

We are told that academia is a space where the limits of reality donot apply, and that exploring knowledge is a joyous journey. I have found it to be untrue on many accounts. Firstly, your discourses are only safe to materialise once they engage with the already existing hegemonic discourses of reality – the creativity and truth of marginalised voices are drowned out by the rational, capitalist, and colonial imaginations of the world we inhabit. Secondly, knowledge acquisition is an act of immense privilege and often marked by feelings of guilt and doubts. I claim this not only in anger, but as a preface to the story of my thesis.

Bot, ke labh aazaad hain tere, Bot, zubaanab tak teri hai Speak out! For your words are free Speak up! For your tongue is still your own 12

Being at ISS meant that I had access to resources unavailable to most people in the world, and I was excited to use this opportunity to immerse myself in topics I would never have the opportunity to indulge in. It seemed like the perfect time and place to formulate my research around debates I had so patiently waited to speak of with authority, but I just could not bring myself to do it. I did not gift myself the luxury of picking a research topic that would interest me the most- I chose my topic to practise justice in the smallest way I knew how.

Tera sutwaan jism hai tera Bot, ke jaan ab tak teri hai Your body remains yours-ramrod, erect. Speak out! For your life is still your own.13

“Young Muslim activists house demolished in India,”14 “Muslim teenager killed at a protest in India”15

“Muslims killed, more than 3000 arrested by police during protests against anti-Muslim citizenship laws”16

“No justice in sight for young Muslim boys Mohammad Sameer, 15, and Mohammad Saif, 16, killed during attacks in Delhi that cost 44 Muslim lives”17 “Man beaten to death by mob for being a Muslim in India”18 “Banning the hijab threatens access to education for Muslim girls in India”19 “22-year-old Muslim vendor tortured in Police station in India”20

The Indian state manufactures proof of its fascism in the form of blood and extreme violence inflicted on the Muslim body every day and it somehow is never enough proof. Stuck between a hateful population hellbent on the annihilation of Muslims, killing, lynching,

12 Excerpt from the Urdu poem, Bol (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, alongside its English translation. Retrieved from http://faiza hm edafa izn ewtranslations.blogspot.com/2012/10/faiz-bol_30.html

13 Excerpt from the Urdu poem, Bol (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, alongside its English translation. Retrieved from http://faiza hm eda fa izn ewtranslations.blogspot.com/2012/10 /faiz-bol_30.html

14https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/13/act-of-vendetta-afreen-fatima-on-her-house-bulldozed-in-india

15https://edition.enn.com/2022/06/22/india/muslim-teenager-shot-islam-protest-police-intl-hnk-dst/ind ex.html

16https://freepresskashmirnews/2022/02/17/23-muslims-killed-more-than-3000-arrested-by-up-policeduring-anti-caa-protests-report/

17 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/2/the-living-memories-of-the-2020-delhi-riots-in-india

18 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/2/the-living-memories-of-the-2020-delhi-riots-in-india

19https://www.devex.com/news/in-india-hijab-ban-threatens-access-to-education-for-muslim-girls-103114

20https://maktoobmedia.com/2022/06/05/up-muslim-vendor-tortured-in-police-station-5-cops-booked/

murdering, dehumanising them and a state that not only enables but perpetuates this violence, Muslims in India today have no allies. We are our own allies. The constant struggle of my people against the violent homogenising nation-making made it important for me to challenge thenarrative aroundit sincetheexisting discourseis shapedthroughtheinteractionofWestern colonial logics with the upper-caste Hindu majoritarian colonisation of the academic spaces.

Dekh, ke tere aahangar ki dukaan mein Tund hai sholay, surkh hai aahan Look! How in your smithy’s forge flames soar; iron glows red.21

I have always liked my morning coffee bitter, but the taste of it has learned to sit on my tongue as a lingering feeling of all the words that I cannot spit out. ‘A little sugar would go a long way, Maano,’ baba has often said to me jokingly, in hopes of seeing his daughter speak from love, instead of anger against the world. But to me, anger is not the absence of love, it is a reaction to preserve the highest forms of love. Therefore, my thesis is an act of anger, in resistance to the colonial constructs of nation-states and the majoritarian Hindu (re)colonisation of India, and it is an act of love– love to those who are left on the fringes of this nation-making project, love to those who dare question this violent project, love to those who have been silenced by this project, love to those who refuse to become subjects of oppression. My thesis will look at theroleof anti-Muslim violencein thecontemporaryHindutva nation-making in India, as informed by Muslims in India.

Khulne lage quflon ke dahaane Phailaa har ek zanjeer ka daaman How the locks have opened yaws and every chain, unlinked, now spreads.22

India has had a long history of being a multi-religious society, wherein Islam found its way into the Indian subcontinent through traders in the South and conquerors in the North dating all the way back to the 7th century AD (Engineer, 1991). The Indian subcontinent was ruled by the Muslim Mughal empire, before they were overpowered by the British during the colonial era. The British adopted a 'policy of neglect' against Muslims since they saw the Muslim population as a major threat to their rule in the subcontinent (Belkacem, 2007). Despite being the foremost anti-colonial force against the British, the Muslims were viewed through the lenses of doubt by the Indian National Congress, the political organisation spearheading the Indian freedom struggle. This added to the skepticism of Muslim leaders regarding the future of Muslims in the country after independence and thereby demands were made for a separate state– Pakistan. With independence from the British in 1947 came the partition of the Indian subcontinent into the Islamic state of Pakistan and the secular, democratic republic of India. While partition saw the biggest mass migration in the history of the world on both sides of the borders, many Muslims decided to 'stay' in India which they envisioned as their own country, such that today Muslims make up almost 15 percent of the country at around 200 million. Not long after the establishment of India, its democratic and secular values began eroding, wherein independent India became a breeding ground for militant Hinduism which has seen its surges at different points in time throughout the 1970s to the 2000s (Deshmukh, 2021). While there is a case to be made for the idea of India, that came into existence vis-avis the birth of Pakistan, to be unsecular and anti-Muslim since its inception, the coming of the right-wing Hindu nationalist party- the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) into power in 2014 has

21 Excerpt from the Urdu poem, Sol (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, alongside its English translation. Retrieved from http://faizahmedafaiznewtranslations.biogs pot.com/2012/10/faiz-bol_30.html

22 Excerpt from the Urdu poem, Bol (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, alongside its English translation. Retrieved from http://faizahmedafaiznewtranslations.biogspot.com/2012/10/faiz-bol_30.html

accelerated the Hindu nation making project such that it has been actively adopted by the state. According to Kamat and Mathew (2003) the Hindu nation making project in India has its roots in the Hindutva movement which can be traced back to 1925 when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, literally,National VolunteerCorps) was founded for"propagating Hindu culture." The Hindutva movement is organised under the organisation called the Sangh, wherein RSS is the militant and ideological wing, and the BJP is the political wing. The primary objective of the RSS is the transformation of lndia into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) through the imposition of upper caste Hindu social and religious practices onto the diverse population of the country. Ideologically the premise of the Hindu Rashtra is based on the creation of two groups- insiders and outsiders, those who belong to the Hindu family and those who fall outside the fold of Hinduness. In the words of the Supreme Leader of the RSS, Golwalkar (1939):

“The foreign races in Hindusthan [India] must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those oftheglorificationoftheHinduraceandculture,andmustloose(sic)theirseparateexistence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges far less any preferential treatment? not even citizen's rights. There is, at least, should be, no other course for them to adopt.”

"Foreign races," ironically here do not refer to the British who were the colonisers at the time, but to Muslims in the subcontinent. Thereby, at the crux of the establishment of a Hindu nation-state is an anti-Muslim sentiment, where Muslims are painted as "invaders" and "outsiders." The political wing of the Sangh, the BJP, voted into power in 2014 and then again in 2019 via vast majorities, is currently ruling the country. While lslamophobia has always been rampant in India, it is now state backed.

Bol, yeh thodaa waqt bahut hai Jism-o-iubaan ki maut se pehle

The short time left to you is enough. Speak up, before the body and its tongue give out.23

Muslims, the most marginalised community in India as per the report of Sachar Committee (2006), have embodied silence for centuries. The White Man's world teaches you to read silence as weakness because it operates to erase your voice and I was no exception to accepting that as the truth. However, Sara Motta's understanding of Silence (Motta, 2018) has taught meto listentoSilence–andmoreimportantly,to viewSilenceas morethanjust absence of a voice.

I rarely ever meet any Muslims from India in academic spaces and their absence is rendered in my mind as silence If I do not speak, I have thought to myself, nobody will The fear of my people being erased in silence sometimes is bigger than the fear of being erased altogether. I am used to others not speaking up for us, but my fears often translate into anger when I see that my own people constantly shy away from talking– they go out of their way to ask me to not be as loud about the horrors of the violence. This silence, the reluctance to talk, the absence from spaces, their protective urge towards my voice, made me look at Indian Muslims as cowards and hypocritical. But this silence has a name- it is called survival. The Hindu nation making has not only enforced Silence onto Muslims through physical violence, but it has also instilled Silence as a form of second nature onto Muslims. Sara Motta (2018) very rightfully puts it when she says, "[W]hen we dare to speak the truth of the violence, when wespeak throughthevulnerabilityandpain ofour enfleshedexperiences, wefeel thefull force of the Law and the Rational Truth. We are rendered mute as hysteric, liar, or deviant, or in the

23 Excerpt from the Urdu poem, Bol (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, alongside its English translation. Retrieved from http://faizahmedafaiznewtranslations.blogspot.com/2012/10/faiz-bol_30.html

worstcase,perpetrator." DissenthasbeenturnedSeditiousinIndia.AllandanyMuslimvoices are under direct attack of the state for doing the bare minimum exposing the truth. As I write this paper, countless Muslim journalists, lawyers, academics, students, and activists are being actively harassed, intimidated, arrested by the State. Those who are not silent are being violently gagged and censored. Motta (2018) claims that silence is not the absence of knowingbeing- people whose bodies are used as sites of extreme violence for the expansion of a capitalist homogenising nation-state project are not oblivious to it, they understand the project better than the perpetrators of it. However, the ever-present threat of violent interventions onto thebodiesofthecommunitymakesitnotsafetospeak.IhavebeenraisedontheUrduproverb, ‘Jaan hai to Jahaan hai,’ which roughly translates to, ‘If you have a life, you have the world’, meaning a living body can do more for the community, than a dead one. Silence of the oppressed communities is not the death of their conscience, it is resistance.

Sara Motta (2018) says that when permitted, speech is only allowed in the script of the 'master' such that the oppressed communities reduce themselves and reproduce their stories in categories that are used to name, shame, and tame them. My thesis is a deviation from the act of Silence as resistance, and I can choose this path only because of my immense privilege, therefore it becomes my responsibility to not reproduce in my work any colonial, capitalist, majoritarian structures of any of my oppressors. Conducting ethical research is a continuous practice and not a final act- I intend to do my part by bringing in acceptance of Refusal as explained by Tuck and Yang (2014).

By virtue of my birth the story of Indian Muslims is also my story, but it is not a story I own. The same privilege that affords me the space and freedom to talk about the horrors of the nation making project while escaping the violent machinery of it, is also what distances me from telling the story with absolute authority. I am an outsider to the pain, sorrow, apprehensions, and fear of Indian Muslims- I am only an observer. I entered this research with the intention of not only challenging the dominant narratives around nation-making, but also documenting the stories of people that are constantly being erased by and drowned in state propaganda. However, as Tuck and Yang (2014) point out- damage centred research often leaves communities with a narrative that tells them they are broken without any actual reparations. According to the scholars, they do not mean to argue for Silence, but instead to make a distinction between different kinds of stories. While stories are meant to be passed along, not all of them as social science research. Making this distinction between the stories L hear during the journey of my research is important to practise Refusing. Refusal of research is not easy inthiscontext,becausesocialscienceshaveanobsessionwithinvitingoppressedcommunities to speak only of their pain. However, no research is bigger than the people it tells the story about. Therefore, it is important to remember that at the end of the day the research is conducted for the people and not for the fulfilment of the researcher. Refusal is thus the true test of a researcher.

Bot, ke sach rindaa hai ab tak Bot, jo kuch kehnaa hai keh-Ie! Speak out, for truth still survives Speak out! Say whatever you have to say!24

Between Silence and Refusal, I aspire to use my anger to tum my thesis into a product of love.

lnquilab Zindabad! Long Live the Revolution!

24 Excerpt from the Urdu poem, Bol (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, alongside its English translation. Retrieved from http://faizahmedafaiznewtranslations.blogspot.com/2012/10/faiz-bol_30.html

References

Belmekki, B. (2007) ‘The impact of British Rule on the Indian Muslim Community in the nineteenth Century’, ES: Revista de filología inglesa, (28), pp. 27–46. Available at: http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/17339.

Deshmukh, J. (2021) ‘Terrorizing Muslims: Communal Violence and Emergence of Hindutva in India’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 41(2), pp. 317-336, doi:10.1080/13602004.2021.1943884

Engineer, A. A. (1991). ‘Remaking Indian Muslim Identity’. Economic and Political Weekly, 26(16), pp. 1036-1038. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4397952

Golwalkar, M.S. (1939) We Or Our Nationhood Defined. Bangalore, India: Bharat Publications. Available at: https://sanjeev.sabhlokcity.com/Misc/We-or-Our-Nationhood-Defined-Shri-M-S-Golwalkar.pdf.

Kamat, S. and Mathew, B. (2003) ‘Mapping Political Violence in a Globalised World: The Case of Hindu Nationalism’, Social Justice, 30(3 (93)), pp. 4–16. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768205.

Motta, S. C. (2018). Liminal subjects: weaving (our) liberations (Ser. Radical subjects in international politics). London Etc.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sachar Committee (2006) Social,EconomicandEducationalStatusoftheMuslimCommunity of India. New Delhi: Cirrus Graphics Pvt. Ltd. Available at: https://www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/default/files/sachar_comm.pdf.

Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2014) ‘R-Words: Refusing Research’, in Humanising Research: Decolonizing Qualitative InquirywithYouthand Communities. SAGE Publications, Inc., pp. 223–247. doi:10.4135/9781544329611.

The Story Behind my Thesis: Plus-Size Black Women Healing from Anti-Blackness and Fatphobia Within the U.S Healthcare System and Society

By Nadia C.E. Ndiaye, Senegal and USA

Introduction

It was 10 am on a Wednesday, and I was in the Transitions for Social Justice Lab. Before the break, my course leader, Rosalba, reminded us to think about a story within our thesis for our final assignment. While she was explaining the specifics, my mind wandered. I asked myself “what is the story behind my thesis, and why am I writing about it?” But I could not remember. Once we went for a coffee break however I had the harsh reminder that I had not eaten anything since 4 pm the day before. My memories came flooding back.

Throughout my life, my body and my race have been policed within the Western (specifically American) contexts I grew up in. Since the age of eight, I was always told to lose weight, in order to become closer to whiteness, closer to being accepted. As a consequence of years of unsolicited health advice and unsolicited comments regarding my appearance, I developed unhealthy habits with food and body image, and these habits became my coping mechanisms. When I decided that I wanted to be healthier and reject the Eurocentric beauty standards established in spite of my identity, I began researching how I can recover. While conducting research, I realised that it would be difficult for me, and people like me, to receive the psychological and physical treatment that we deserve. Based on my observations, plus-size Black women trying to receive treatment for eating disorders face intersectional discrimination due to their race, gender, and size (Jouwe 2015). I was devastated knowing that the institutions established to heal me will only further perpetuate the colonial ideologies that caused my pain (Motta 2018, p.7). That’s when I remembered why I chose this thesis topic. I wanted to use this intersectional injustice as the focus of my master’s thesis, with the aim to provide solutions on how to improve the human rights, including the human dignity, of marginalised bodies like my own.

The Transitions for Social Justice Lab emphasises the importance of storytelling and utilising acts of liberation, such as learning, nurturing, and hosting. This story will interact with the act of healing, which leads to the central question: What exactly do racialised, gendered, and plus-size African American bodies need to heal from? This story will illustrate the need for plus-size, feminised, African American bodies to heal from the hateful dialogues attacking them, and the mistreatment they experience when seeking medical treatment due to racist and fatphobic approaches in medicine, especially for eating disorders. This story is important to me not only because it is one of my own personal stories, but because it is important to acknowledge the complex forms of pain that larger Black bodies in the Western world experience and take the appropriate steps towards the healing process. Larger femme-presenting Black bodies, as well as all (marginalised) bodies, must be given the right to health, the right to human dignity, and the right to heal from the long-term effects of colonial socio-economic and medical structures (Motta, 2018; Ureña, 2019). In order to better understand the story behind my thesis, the topic needs to be further explained and contextualised.

Contextualisation of thesis

My thesis will discuss the stories of the fatphobic, racist, and sexist discrimination experienced by plus-size Black Americans in the American healthcare system. The story of my thesis will take a human rights approach since it is examining how these forms of discrimination have negatively impacted the human dignity of larger African Americans. Specifically, through looking at the

violation of one’s access to health and the violations of one’s access to “all the rights and freedoms” (Harrison, 2018; Strings, 2019; Cowles, 2022; United Nations, 2020).

Intersectionality – the primary theoretical framework for my master’s thesis – is characterised as the examination of how race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, etc. impact the privileges a person may (not) experience (Jouwe 2015). Another concept, and its accompanying social movement, relevantto thestoryofmythesisistheBodyNeutralityMovement.Bodyneutralityfocusesonhaving an intuitive relationship with your body through de-prioritising one’s physical appearance, while simultaneously appreciating your body and mind’s abilities (e.g your body’s ability to listen to music). Furthermore, body neutrality and the Body Neutrality Movement emphasise the importance ofshowingkindness,patience,andcompassiontowardsyourselfandyourbody(Fuller,2021;Kessel, 2018; Cowles, 2022). I chose the Body Neutrality Movement rather than the Body Positivity Movement to help share this story, considering that the Body Positivity Movement has erased the marginalised bodies that created the movement, and implicitly reinforced the importance of conforming to Eurocentric beauty ideals in order to feel valued. Consequently, larger (Black) people may be encouraged to continue with their disordered eating habits (Kessel, 2018; Fuller, 2021). The Body Neutrality Movement accentuates how healing requires discovering which healing processes are most compatible with your positionality. This reflects the dynamism and subjectivity within healing. Regardless of how subjective healing processes may be, the larger goal of freeing the larger and feminised Black body from the white male gaze is the priority (Motta, 2018).

I felt as if this story needed to be told in academic spaces, for there is very little information linking the Body Neutrality Movement with human rights, especially when it involves the human dignity of marginalised bodies in the Western world. Telling the stories of how Black women like myself will not (or have not) receive full access to their human rights will help human rights academics furtherre-examinethecontested interpretations and approaches to humandignity(Düwell, 2011; Daly and Barak, 2021; United Nations., 2020). Furthermore, the negative experiences of plussizeBlack womensufferingwith eatingdisordersillustratehowissues revolving arounddevelopment do not only occur in the Global South, since the Global North’s inability to acknowledge the colonial wounds they have perpetrated onto their former colonised subjects (e.g. by devaluing their bodies) are causing problems in the development sector, such as access to adequate healthcare (Ureña, 2019; Strings, 2019; United Nations, 2020).

Healing from fatphobic and anti-Black discourses in the United States

Larger and femme-presenting African American bodies need to heal from the problematic discourses that were made to dehumanise and disparage them. These fatphobic, racist, and misogynistic narratives targeting Black women were utilised to strengthen the colonial identity of Anglo-Saxon settlers (especially women settlers) in the United States, and these discourses were established by popular magazines in the 1800s (Strings 2019). Popular American magazines, aimed at women, spewed their horrid beliefs that larger Black women cannot be humanised because we were simply not human. In actuality, 1800s America viewed curvaceous Black women as lazy “pigs” because they differed from white societies and their white gazes (Strings, 2019; Motta 2018). Magazines like Harper’s Bazar represent howcolonialwoundscanbecreated,andhowtheyareinfact“theepistemic rupture enacted by the European encounter in the Americas, […] which resulted in the devaluing of [the] non-European” (Strings, 2019; Ureña, 2019). These beliefs also imply that Black women in the West need to assimilate to whiteness, including thinness, in an attempt to decrease our dehumanisation (Motta, 2018; Strings, 2019). Assimilating to whiteness through thinness can have dangerous consequences, from substance abuse to severe eating disorders (Kessel 2018). These explanations help us “make sense of the traumas inflicted upon” African American women and Black women in the Western world, yet it is not a justification for our trauma (Motta 2018). Thankfully, body neutrality is a healing tool that enables us to comprehend the functions of

our bodies and how they work beyond “the White patriarchal gaze of capitalist-coloniality” (Motta, 2018). For instance, the Body Neutrality Movement reminds us to be appreciative of our bodies’ ability to show empathy towards ourselves, others, and the environments in which we live in (Dall’Asen, 2021). Moreover, this social movement encourages us to listen to our bodies’ needs, such as our bodies’ need to rest from daily hardships (which includes institutional oppression) through sleeping or practicing acts that will bring us inner peace (Kessel, 2018; Fuller, 2021). An example of an act that can provide inner peace is the act of being in silence. Being in silence, rather than being silenced, is “a weapon, a tactic of survival, and a place of possibility” (Motta, 2018) that can occur without confronting the colonisers who are unable to even acknowledge the pain they have caused African American women like me (Ureña, 2019). In the context of healing from fatphobia and its racist origins, an example of being in silence can be expressing words of affirmation to ourselves and other larger, feminine, and racialised bodies. We must remind ourselves that our beauty and value come from the resilience of our ancestors who gave us strength and enabled us to survive up to now. We must use our words of encouragement to go beyond Eurocentric understandings of beauty and health, for we know that these understandings were established to minimise our existence. That being said, mentioning the counterarguments to being in silence is significant towards sharing this story of healing, in order to demonstrate how diverse healing is as an act of liberation. Ureña’s article mentions how Frantz Fanon approaches healing through “break[ing] the silence of the wound” by expressing his resentment towards colonialist hierarchies yet mentions how this form of healing did lead “to a wall of miscommunication” (Ureña, 2019). Personally, I believe a combination of both Fanon’s and Motta’s approaches to healing could be beneficial for those who resonate with this story. I believe voicing our frustrations towards social and institutional systems that function at the expense of (larger) Black people is the first step to obtaining justice and gaining proper access to our human rights. As mentioned by Ureña, this form of advocacy does not guarantee social and institutional reform (Ureña, 2019). Therefore, we must work on ourselves and within our communities because we, our ancestors, and our descendants, deserve structural and personal justice no matter what.

Healing from the United States fatphobic and racist approaches to health

Racialised, gendered, and plus-size African American individuals need to heal from the pain caused by American practices and approaches to health. The United States medical care system – alongside American society, politics, culture, and economics – continues the legacy of dehumanising the Other’s body by assuming that Black women do not feel (as much) pain as white people, therefore our pain is undermined and overlooked (Ureña, 2019; Taylor, 2020). Plus-sise Black women who are suffering from eating disorders are further neglected. This is because the health sector has embedded fatphobia into their system, thus making it incredibly difficult for larger women with eating disorders to seek treatment. This is illustrated through an array of real-life scenarios, from prioritising weight loss during eating disorder treatments to being denied insurance coverage due to not fitting the stereotypical characteristics of eating disorder patients (Muhlheim, 2021; Strings, 2019; ASDAH 2022), The Body Mass Index (BMI) is another example of why healing needs to occur within larger Black women along with the US medical system (Harrison 2018). This medical system uses the white male coloniser’s body as the standard for health, which puts larger people’s health in jeopardy. This is especially true for Black women since they are genetically able to be healthy at heavier weights (Lowen 2019). Convincing marginalised bodies that they are unhealthy based on the fatphobic and racist ideologies used to create an inaccurate medical tool can lead to people unnecessarily fixating on weight loss, and subsequently developing dangerous eating behaviors (Ureña, 2019; Harrison, 2018; Lowen, 2019). As a result, stories regarding the intersectional and medical violence against racialised and gendered bodies will continue to be produced.

Given our juxtaposition to whiteness and the patriarchy, plus-size Black women in the West have their humanity questioned and denied (Motta 2018). This reflects how, as Fanon experienced, the medical field rejects knowledge that “exceed[s] the perceived boundaries of the discipline” for not aligning with its problematic “classification systems” (Ureña, 2019). There are various possible healing solutions for this socio-institutional problem. One of Frantz Fanon’s approaches to healing “highlights the importance of nurturing relationships that are not rendered pathological by oppressive hierarchical systems” which include “healing the physical, affective, and epistemological wounds of anti-black racism” (Ureña, 2019). The Body Neutrality Movement reflects this approach since it rejects the idea that one should love their body based on how their body fits into oppressive standards of beauty while prioritising intuitive living (Harrison, 2018; Dall’Asen, 2021). The Body Neutrality Movement also symbolises the possibility of taking proactive initiatives to challenge the coloniality within contemporary social and medical systems that are tailored to degrade non-white, noncisgender, non-straight, and non-thin people, such as re-educating ourselves about what it means to be in good health alongside advocating for the demolishment of medical practices that harm larger (Black) communities (Ureña, 2019; ASDAH, 2022b).

Conclusion

It is now 10 pm on a Wednesday, and although the Transitions for Social Justice Lab is over, my healing journey has just begun. My story, and the story of other plus-size Black women in the West, demonstrates our need to heal from colonial narratives and practices that are racist and fatphobic. We can heal through using body neutrality, advocating for our rights, being in silence with ourselves and our communities, and/or unlearning colonial understandings of health and beauty. This journey can expand in many ways. For example, this story can dive into the correlations between healing and refusing, such as refusing the idea that only smaller white bodies are entitled to human dignity when being medically treated. Hopefully, the story behind my thesis is just the start of a larger story about achieving social and racial equality in America’s social and medical sectors. Because the world deserves to heal. We deserve to heal. I deserve to heal.

References

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