Journal articles on the topic 'Plural legacies'

Difference is among the twentieth century’s most volatile legacies to the twenty-first. Over this period it has increasingly lodged itself in our cultural consciousness, as both theoretical concept and lived experience. Its workings are refracted through culture (through phenomena such as music) and the way we contemplate and study it (through a journal such as this). A Brief History of Difference, at least the chapter relevant to the present story, might start in the early part of the last century with Ferdinand de Saussure’s courses on linguistics. Not only language, but potentially all signifying phenomena, Saussure argued, articulate the world for us by cutting it into units (e.g. phonemes, concepts, words, signs) that carry meaning precisely through being differentiated from one another: reality is rendered as a system of mutually conditioning differences. By mid-century these ideas had become decisive for literary and cultural theory under the banner of structuralism and semiotics, in which even a cultural practice such as fashion could be seen to signify as a system of difference. With the rise of poststructuralism and deconstruction, difference (or différance) was again seminal in debates about the very nature of meaning, which in turn informed later twentieth-century cultural politics of class and society, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. (As we know, all these movements would also in the end, and no less contentiously, make their mark on musicology.) Most recently – in terms far from academic – cultural difference has moved into the foreground of global consciousness with the literally shattering and explosive events of our new century.

Abstract In this introduction to the Special Issue, we suggest a decolonised and entangled perspective in norms research that transcends the Western legacies of global norms by taking into account the complex constellations and interactions within and between norms. We seek to move beyond the dichotomy of ‘good’ Western versus ‘bad’ non-Western norms without simply reversing it. We instead propose to integrate three dimensions into norms research: 1) revealing the ambivalences and ambiguities inherent to norms; 2) investigating plural actors as vectors of normative change; and 3) broadening the disciplinary realm of norms research. Our aim is to further develop the empirical and conceptual discussion of norms that moves beyond a Western bias without simply giving up on normative assessments of norms.

This article offers an extension to the use of pedagogical narrations by con-sidering it as a methodology for post-foundational child studies research. The author contends that pedagogical narrations have evolved into a methodological approach that is able to attend to the complexity and plural-ity of childhood. The article begins with a brief review of the evolution of child studies and some of the legacies of modernism that continue to impact childhood research today. This is fol-lowed by an overview of how the process of pedagogical narrations has served to resist particular modernist assumptions. It concludes with an exploration of how this process holds the potential to blur the boundaries between such dichotomous binaries as child/adult, theory/practice and mat-ter/discourse and open up spaces and dialogue for an ethical approach to childhood research.

Caste and race, Dalits and Black people, and the common ground between them have been analyzed in many areas, but their conjunction in the environmental field has been neglected. This article locates Dalit ecologies by examining the close connection between caste and nature. Drawing from a plural framework of environmental justice and histories of environmental struggles among African Americans, it focuses on historical and contemporary ecological struggles of Dalits. It contemplates how their initial articulations under the rubric of civil rights developed into significant struggles over issues of Dalit access, ownership, rights, and partnership regarding natural resources, where themes of environmental and social justice appeared at the forefront. The intersections between Dalit and Black ecologies, the rich legacies of Black Panthers and Dalit Panthers, and their overlaps in environmental struggles open for us a new historical archive, where Dalit and Black power can talk to each other in the environmental present.

Singapore’s future Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, wrote a significant and neglected body of short stories while studying Law in London in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Under the influence of his London contemporaries such as Mulk Raj Anand, Rajaratnam’s stories do imaginative work that prepares the ground for decolonization. In engaging with Malayan nationalism, they inevitably encounter the problematics of imagining a nation from the complex legacies of a colonial plural society. Thus, while the stories construct a gendered social imaginary, in which a feminized tradition is relegated to the private sphere of culture, they are troubled by the category of “race” and through a series of elisions fail to imagine a multiracial polity. The uneasiness provoked in a contemporary reader by the stories, however, is useful in challenging hegemonic categorizations of race in contemporary Singapore, particularly in the tightened “racial governmentality” of the nation-state from the 1980s onwards.

Abstract African experiences have so far not been central to Anthropocene debates. While the Anthropocene usefully theorizes the planetary dimensions of environmental change, how do its propositions hold when applied to specific and widely divergent settings? Drawing from three examples—copper mining in Zambia, gold mining in South Africa, and oil drilling in Nigeria—this article examines varied experiences of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Resource extraction, which moves tons of earth and heavily pollutes the air and soils, epitomizes the Anthropocene. In order to grasp ways of living with extraction and its toxic legacies in African localities, it is necessary to consider situated histories of capitalism and colonialism and how these have generated intersectional positionalities, in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, and race. These histories inform actors’ abilities to envisage alternatives to the Anthropocene in the present and future. Inspired by decolonial frameworks, this article begins to chart more plural ways to write the Anthropocene.

AbstractThe social history of colonial Southeast Asia has often been narrated through the lens of ‘plural societies’, where various ethnic groups rarely mixed. This article challenges that narrative by pointing to traditions of multi-ethnic interaction, particularly in port cities, dating back to an early modern age of commerce. Although colonialism introduced new racial hierarchies that reinforced stark ethnic divides, it also created arenas where these could be transgressed. In the interwar era, international organizations, such as Rotary clubs, provided a way of breaking the colour bar of colonial society and a venue for multi-ethnic representation in a shared associational space. They converged with existing notions of civic duty, while promoting a public intellectual culture in cities for both men and women, as well as a new sense of regionalism. In ethnically divided Malaya, Asian Rotarians questioned the importance of race and debated the possibilities of a multi-ethnic future for the nation. While such cosmopolitan ideals were more vulnerable in the post-colonial era of nation-states, the organizations of the interwar era left important legacies for civil society in the region.

This article discusses the relations between school culture and the innovation processes necessary for schools, inserted in a complex, globalized, plural and technological society, to continue to meet the needs of their students. It seeks to highlight the educational legacies of the twentieth century (SAVIANI, 2017), the paradigmatic transitions in education (PACHECO, 2019; VALDEMARIN, 2017) and the school rituals that constitute the culture, essential to explain the purposes of the school (not the teaching objectives, but the reason for the existence of the school), and consequently, the definition of the curriculum and the strengthening of teacher´s identity (SOUZA, 2017). From the explanation of the school's purpose, we begin to discuss the relationship that it should establish with digital culture and with innovational processes. Crises drive innovation because they create different needs for people (PACHECO, 2019; BENITO, 2017). The moment that is being lived, generating new needs, will drive innovations in educational and schools. It is important to have clarity of the school purpose of education, so that the ruptures and innovations are ethical and might meet the welfare of the students (CORNISH, 2019) and the teachers, as well as the educational needs of an ethical citizen, globally and locally.

AbstractPluralism is a discernible feature of many modern states. However, among the variants of pluralism, religious pluralism appears to be the most intractable in many modern states because faiths and values underpin the conflicts that are associated with it. As one of the legacies of the Enlightenment, secularism is a normative prescription for managing religious pluralism. Nevertheless, while many African states profess to be secular, more often than not there are no concrete strategies to objectify the secular arrangement thereby provoking questions on the status quo. Such was the case with the 2015 Muslims’ protest of discrimination in the public basic and second cycles schools in Ghana. Through primary (interviews and archival and historical documents) and secondary data, this paper examines the protest in light of the secularist arrangement. It first reviews the contours of the secularist’s lenses. Second, it historicizes Muslim-Christian relations in Ghana. It also analyzes the checkered partnership between the state and the Christian missions in the provision of education. Moreover, it evaluates the debates that ensued and the ambivalent communiqué that the National Peace Council (NPC) issued. The paper concludes with a note that underscores the dynamics and tensions that characterize many plural societies in their attempt to objectify the secularist principle.

Abstract As our contemporary international order seems to come apart at its seams in the trenches of Eastern Europe, many observers have sought solace in the promises made by the historical crucible in which this order was forged. It was, after all, in the aftermath of a previous global conflagration that a planetary constellation of statespeople attempted to create an architecture that would save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ under the aegis of the ‘United Nations Organization’ (uno). In hindsight, it is easy to look at the years that led to the creation of this international institution—and the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) of 1948, one of its central pillars—as a decisive ‘Grotian moment,’ insofar as it promised a new age for international ordering. And yet, the historical record shows that those contemporary to the making of the uno and the udhr were less certain about the ‘Grotianness’ of the moment they were living. In this sense, I argue that the plural legacies of the years 1941–1948 have been contested and disputed from the outset. In this contribution I think with, and perhaps against, the notion of ‘Grotian moments’ to interrogate how a narrative of the udhr as a watershed period for secularized individual rights came to eclipse another account of the udhr, which highlighted the centrality of collective welfare for the post-war settlement.

Urban planning as a networked field of governance can be an essential contributor for de-colonising planning education and shaping pathways to urban equality. Educating planners with the capabilities to address complex socio-economic, environmental and political processes that drive inequality requires critical engagement with multiple knowledges and urban praxes in their learning processes. However, previous research on cities of the global South has identified severe quantitative deficits, outdated pedagogies, and qualitative shortfalls in current planning education. Moreover, the political economy and pedagogic practices adopted in higher education programmes often reproduce Western-centric political imaginations of planning, which in turn reproduce urban inequality. Many educational institutions across the global South, for example, continue teaching colonial agendas and fail to recognise everyday planning practices in the way cities are built and managed. This article contributes to a better understanding of the relation between planning education and urban inequalities by critically exploring the distribution of regional and global higher education networks and their role in de-colonising planning. The analysis is based on a literature review, quantitative and qualitative data from planning and planning education networks, as well as interviews with key players within them. The article scrutinises the geography of these networks to bring to the fore issues of language, colonial legacies and the dominance of capital cities, which, among others, currently work against more plural epistemologies and praxes. Based on a better understanding of the networked field of urban planning in higher education and ongoing efforts to open up new political imaginations and methodologies, the article suggests emerging room for manoeuvre to foster planner’s capabilities to shape urban equality at scale.

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today. What has often received less attention is how such emancipatory alternatives are burdened with problematic legacies living on within, in the epistemic heritage enabling and organising societal transformation. The ‘post-’ prefix, and the break from capitalism that it announces, has largely been treated as a given. This study resists such temptations of the affirmative in order to ask how restrictive and counterproductive burdens are carried along in emancipatory thought and practice, and how their continuous negotiation might have to redefine postcapitalism itself. Taking the ‘post-’ seriously demands critical and theoretical skills capable of examining the complexity of our inherited troubles. This thesis offers a theoretical contribution to this juncture by bringing together the feminist economic geography of JK Gibson-Graham and the deconstructive philosophical practice of Jacques Derrida. Gibson-Graham’s framework of diverse economies has become a major contribution to thinking and practising postcapitalist politics. It offers a popular affirmative and experimental approach to collective life, one that discards the givenness of economic truths and power in favour of a heterogeneous landscape of interdependent agency. Here, however, the attention is on Gibson-Graham’s early, theoretical examination and critique of capitalocentrism: the omission, forgetting and subjugation of existing more-than-capitalist economies. This notion underlines the necessity to unlearn capitalist homogeneity in order for a plural, prismatic economy of coexistence to come to view: the worst forms of exploitation coexisting with the best of emancipations, both demanding situated negotiation and collective action. Capitalocentrism functions as a conceptual ground of the diverse economies framework, yet its theoretical, empirical and political complexity has largely been left unexamined. While the concept of capitalocentrism works to motivate its alternatives, its use simultaneously exhibits an unproblematised belief in overcoming the problem of postcapitalist burdens. To think capitalocentrism as a continuous, unownable task, rather than a solid stepping stone for emancipation, it is theorised here as an inheritance with the help of Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida’s ‘rigorously parasitic’ approach towards constitutive givens and his negotiation of troubling legacies offer a distinct approach to received problematics. Here, his writings on heritage, archives and violence are examined as situated practices of reinterpretative work with/in various legacies. This allows a distinct conceptual and methodological approach to inheritances that pivots on a vigilance of (self-)critique and a practice of close, complicit reading. The inheritedness of our textual materiality, with its historical promises and perils all too closely intertwined, becomes the issue. It allows a persistent negotiation of and oscillation between determinate, situated problematics and the incalculable and unlocatable. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism becomes a heterogeneous and unownable legacy that both enables and haunts the thinking of postcapitalist space and economy. Developing such a conceptual and methodological approach to postcapitalist problems, this thesis studies capitalocentric inheritances in four main chapters. First, the concept of capitalocentrism and its critical role in Gibson-Graham’s framework is treated in light of deconstruction’s promises. Second, Derrida’s economies of violence are studied to conceptualise capitalocentrism as a problem of history. Third, popular and academic debates concerning postcapitalism are explored as negotiations of capitalocentric inheritances. Fourth, the capitalocentrism of language itself becomes the issue as a problematic negotiated in sites and theories of translation. Altogether, this study proposes an attention to postcapitalist economic geographies that supplements emancipatory approaches with a critical-deconstructive attention to their limitations. Amidst immediate demands for social and economic transformation, it underlines what mediates those demands: the troubled language, the complicit sensorium that we inherit. By offering fresh grounds for rethinking the inherited futures of space and economy, it submits a challenge to claims that purport to govern and overcome the postcapitalist problem of constitutive burdens. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism necessitates drastic renegotiations of postcapitalist givens. This task is here called, tentatively, postcapitalist studies. Keywords capitalocentrism, deconstruction, diverse economies, inheritance, Jacques Derrida, JK Gibson-Graham, postcapitalist studies

En Roma, entre 1682 y 1683, el procurador dominico peruano y el secretario de la legación española intercambiaron insultos a través de un conjunto de sátiras. El ingenioso y maledicente corpus reveló más que la creciente animadversión entre ambos personajes: develó la tensión y conflicto en varios círculos de poder, la burocracia papal frente a la Corona española, la esfera de influencia de la embajada española y los debates entre hispanoamericanos y europeos respecto de la identidad religiosa indiana. Finalmente, este episodio evidencia la promoción de la agenda cultural de los letrados hispanoamericanos en la república de las letras católica global.

The post-New Wave films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors remain under-analysed terrain, both in terms of their potential relevance for interrogating how we understand the British New Wave itself and for the terms in which we might conceptualise a ‘Long’ New Wave. This article departs from persisting auteurist approaches to consider the post-New Wave oeuvres and careers of these directors collectively, in terms which foreground the importance of collaborations and networks rather than individual authorship and seek to decentre, denaturalise and potentially dislodge their pre-eminent association with specifically Northern, British, social realism and its presumed legacies. I argue for the importance of a cluster of less-analysed areas of intersection and development which emerge across the eclectic film-making careers of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger (and, to a lesser extent, Karel Reisz) in the immediate post-New Wave decade from the 1963 success of Richardson's Tom Jones to the early 1970s. My discussion pivots on two commonalities: during this time, all three directors contributed significantly and plurally to innovations and advances in genre and representation across two areas distinct from British Northern working-class realism: historical/costume film genres, and queer representation. An approach which centres the (broadly defined) queer elements in these directors’ post-New Wave oeuvres – intersecting at times with their equally undervalued contribution to ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema – reveals the ‘Long’ New Wave as substantially a cinema of adaptation, collaboration and queerness which encompassed important, near-forgotten, international projects as well as modernist influences and, in Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, a significant advance in realist queer representation.

This essay explores two instances in the modern Punjabi literary engagement with the past, to consider the ways the writing of Sikh history has been configured as a modern literary construct. After brief consideration of the canonical work Sundarī by Bhai Vir Singh (1898), I consider a novel by Kartar Singh Duggal Nānak Nām Chaṛhdī Kalā (1989, “Blessed are those who Remember God”) to examine the legacies of the formulation of Sikh history operating in Vir Singh’s work. In doing so, I also consider the ways exclusionary and plural discourses coexist and comingle, to understand the multivalent nature of such representations, which cannot be assumed to express singular political affiliations and therefore reflect the complexity of Sikh articulations within colonial and postcolonial political fields.

AbstractThis commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers—specialist and non‐specialist, academic and non‐academic—with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine–Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation. These objectives are informed by a strong conviction that now is not a time for equivocation or silence. Palestinians, both in Palestine and in exile, need robust support and solidarity. This commentary offers one example of the form this support and solidarity can take in the context of academia. It does so by calling forth our discipline's plural and deep commitment to justice and thoroughgoing critique of the deleterious power structures and colonial legacies that have brought us to this current moment of crisis in Palestine.

AbstractWithin governance agencies, academia, and communities alike, there are increasing calls to recognize the value and importance of culture within social‐ecological systems and to better implement Indigenous sciences in research, policy, and management. Efforts thus far have raised questions about the best ethical practices to do so. Engaging with plural worldviews and perspectives on their own terms reflects cultural evolutionary processes driving paradigm shifts in 3 fundamental areas of natural resource management: conceptualizations of natural resources and ecosystems, processes of public participation and governance, and relationships with Indigenous Peoples and communities with differing worldviews. We broadly describe evolution toward these paradigm shifts in fish and wildlife management. We then use 3 case studies to illustrate the ongoing cultural evolution of relationships between wildlife management and Indigenous practices within specific historical and social‐ecological contexts and reflect on common barriers to appropriately engaging with Indigenous paradigms and lifeways. Our case studies highlight 3 priorities that can assist the field of wildlife management in achieving the changes necessary to bridge incommensurable worldviews: acknowledging and reconciling historical legacies and their continued power dynamics as part of social‐ecological systems, establishing governance arrangements that move beyond attempts to extract cultural information from communities to integrate Indigenous Knowledges into dominant management paradigms, and engaging in critical reflexivity and reciprocal, accountable relationship building. Implementing these changes will take time and a commitment to processes that may initially feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar but have potential to be transformative. Ethical and culturally appropriate methods to include plural and multivocal perspectives and worldviews on their own terms are needed to transform wildlife management to achieve more effective and just management outcomes for all.

Abstract Property has a ubiquitous presence in international practice, but its implications for theorizing world order are not adequately explored. I remedy this by showing how property constitutes the core concepts of anarchy and sovereignty in international relations (IR) as overlapping spaces of right-based governance. I develop my account of a property-based world order in relation to the work of John Locke. Locke is generally overlooked as a core IR thinker, with the unfortunate consequence that anarchy and sovereignty are conceptualized as polar opposites under the enduring shadow of Hobbes. Even prominent critics of Hobbesian anarchy rely on Hobbesian notions of sovereignty, resulting in minimalist conceptions of international society and international ethics. To counter these Hobbesian legacies, I turn to Locke's limited, plural, and fluid accounts of anarchy and sovereignty and show how they are grounded in a normative notion of property that mutually constitutes them. This provides an alternative to the Hobbesian absolutist conceptions of anarchy and sovereignty that many IR theorists still operate with. The result is a distinctly normative vision for IR that condemns the twin evils of conquest and tyranny.

AbstractThis paper aims at calling geographers' attention to the works of Italian historical demographer Massimo Livi Bacci, who authored fundamental texts on the indigenous genocide in the Americas, on the history of world population, on global migrations and on population's environmental ‘sustainability’. In denouncing colonial crimes, critically questioning commonplaces of Malthusian origin and challenging sovereignist prejudices against migrations, Livi Bacci stresses the need for scholars to fully address the complex relations between space and population in both analyses of empirical cases and elaborations of broader theoretical models. He explicitly raises geopolitical matters on the potential political consequences of demographic and migratory dynamics. Yet, Livi Bacci's huge scholarly production is highly influential among historians and demographers, but seems to have been overlooked by most geographers hitherto. For these reasons, I argue that scholars committed to critical, radical and decolonial geographies of population (past and present) should (re)discover Livi Bacci's contributions. Re‐reading Livi Bacci's works through geographical lenses and connecting them with current geographical scholarship, I show how ‘geo‐demography’ can help geographers to address demographic matters at different scales, by providing insights for a new critical geo‐history of population. This interdisciplinary engagement with the relations between geopolitical matters on sustainability and the ongoing changing in global population has the potential to plurally nourish critical geographical agendas, including on global migrations and colonial legacies.

"(W)hen you look at the historic angle of what’s going on, DJ culture is the future, everything is a mix. Whether it’s video, electronic shit, studio shit, painting, you name it, the psychology is in place. It’s the DJ." – Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, qtd. in Tobin "Turn it up! Bring the noise." – Public Enemy, "Bring the Noise "Turn down that damned noise!!!" Thus began the nightly negotiation with my father during my adolescence — him firmly rooted in his recliner as he stared at the television, me locked in my bedroom, fingers nudging the stereo knobs to experiment with acceptable volumes. It was never, "turn down the music," or "lower that Boogie Down Productions album," it was always, "turn down that damned noise!!!" I hear his words echoed daily in the attitudes of many of the pre-service teachers that I work with as they navigate the tumultuous maelstrom of education in postmodern culture. Perhaps my students merely reveal legacies of their own educational experiences, or perhaps they embody the transitional dissonance of an epochal shift. Regardless of the "origin" of their discomfort, they seem to turn to those of us engaged in preparing them as teachers to sanitise the "mess" they encounter in schools. They desire Skinnerian behaviorist reductionism (if "x" then "y"). They seek to tame the "noise" of the extraordinarily complex endeavor of teaching and learning. I fiddle with the volume knob of my own teaching, crank it up, and offer them hip hop pedagogies.1 By hip hop pedagogies I do not mean simply the inclusion of hip hop culture (e.g., DJing, rapping, graffiti art, dancing) as objects of study in the classroom, although these are indeed worthwhile curricular considerations. Instead of dominant modes of schooling which are informed by a factory model of efficiency and knowledge transmission (Adams et al.), I suggest a fundamental reorientation to pedagogies guided by the aesthetics of hip hop culture, particularly the power of recombinant textuality embodied in hip hop’s "noisy mix." Dick Hebdige locates the origins, as diffuse as they are, of hip hop music in the fundamental nature of the mix, noting that "(r)ap is DJ (disc jockey) and MC (Master of Ceremonies or Microphone Controller) music . . . (I)t relies on pre-recorded sounds. . . . The hip hoppers "stole" music off air and cut it up. Then they broke it down into its component parts and remixed it on tape" (141). Paul Miller identifies the possibilities inherent in such processes: DJ culture – urban youth culture – is all about recombinant potential. It has as a central feature a eugenics of the imagination. Each and every source is fragmented and bereft of prior meaning – kind of like a future without a past. The samples are given meaning only when re-presented in the assemblage of the mix (7) In hip hop, mixing occurs within discursive realities of "noise." Tricia Rose notes that the "sonic power" of hip hop, with its "distinctive bass-heavy, enveloping sound does not rest outside of its musical and social power" (63). She summarizes the significance of this sonic barrage: "Noise" on the one hand and communal countermemory on the other, rap music conjures and razes in one stroke. Rap's rhythms . . . are its most powerful effect. Rap's primary focus is sonic . . . Rap music centers on the quality and nature of rhythm and sound, the lowest, "fattest beats" being the most significant and emotionally charged . . . The arrangement and selection of sounds rap musicians have invented via samples, turntables, tape machines, and sound systems are at once deconstructive (in that they actually take apart recorded musical compositions) and recuperative (because they recontextualise these elements creating new meanings for cultural sounds that have been relegated to commercial wastebins) . . . (64-65 Herein lies one of the most transformative possibilities of hip hop pedagogies – the model it offers as a recombinant text, as a mix. Miller explains: It is in this singularly improvisational role of "recombiner" that the DJ creates what I like to call a "post symbolic mood sculpture," or the mix; a disembodied and transient text . . . The implications of this style of creating art are three fold: 1) by its very nature it critiques the entire idea of intellectual property and copyright law, 2) it reifies a communal art value structure in contrast to most forms of art in late capitalist social contexts, 3) it interfaces communications technology in a manner that anthropomorphisizes it. (12-13 If we were to begin thinking of our classrooms/schools as a mix, as recombinant, fluid texts where the copyrighting privilege of authority in the guise of "teacher" is challenged, where the entire process of teaching and learning becomes communal, and where human/technological cyborgs are valued, we can see how hip hop pedagogies might be transformative. The classroom might become, in my favorite image of postmodern education that William Doll borrows from Milan Kundera and Richard Rorty, a "fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood" (151). Such pedagogical orientations toward the mix invite students to reject modernist attempts to channel and control learning – to "school" the body and mind. Instead, as Potter notes, "hip-hop aims for a world made hole, aporic, fracturing the fragmented, graffiti on graffiti" (8, emphasis in original). Instead of the master narratives of modernity, it "offers us a model . . . as it produces knowledge in the active consumption of the everyday materials the world makes available . . . it is a work which instructs in its process, indeed, by its process" (Block 339). Is this not a better way to envision our work in schools, which Pinar et al. see as ultimately an engagement with larger conversations of what it means to prepare the next generation (847)? Such mixing infuses life into pedagogies as meanings are reassembled, and acknowledges a "new paradigm" that does "not necessarily require new data, but rather (is) characterized by clever and substantively different ways of recasting what we already know" (Samples 187). "The previous meanings," Miller concludes, are "corralled into a space where the differences in time, place, and culture, are collapsed to create a recombinant text or autonomous zone of expression" (14). Hip hop pedagogies offer such "zones" of hybrid selves, hybrid cultures, and hybrid conversations that are recombined continually through collisions with cultures, histories, and technologies. So that’s the noisy mix I share with my students as most salient to postmodern education – cacophonous, turbulent, and sure to infuriate my father, even now. Notes 1. I follow Gore in her use of the plural form of pedagogy: "(Pedagogies) use is important to signify the multiple approaches and practices that fall under the pedagogy umbrella" whereas "rely(ing) on the singular form is to imply greater unity and coherence than is warranted" (7). References Adams, Natalie et al. Learning to Teach: A Critical Approach to Field Experiences. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. Block. Alan. (1998). "Curriculum as Affichiste: Popular Culture and Identity." Curriculum: Toward New Identities. Ed. William F. Pinar. New York: Garland, 325-341. Doll, William E., Jr. A Postmodern Perspective on Curriculum. New York: Teachers College, 1993. Gore, J. The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hebdige, Dick. Cut-n-Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London: Methuen, 1987. Miller, Paul D. "Flow My Blood the DJ Said." Liner notes from Song of a Dead Dreamer. New York: Asphodel, 1995. Pinar, William F. et al. Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Potter Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY, 1995. Public Enemy. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. New York: Def Jam Recordings, 1988. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, N.H.: UP of New England, 1994. Samples, Bob. "Learning as Transformation." Education, Information, and Transformation: Essays on Learning and Thinking. Ed. Jeffrey Kane. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill, 1999. Tobin, Sam. "Permutations: A Conversation with Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky." Digress Magazine. [12, March 2001].<http://www.digressmagazine.com/1spooky.php>

Fig 1: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Introduction NOTE: Rangoon, Burma has been known as Yangon, Myanmar, since 2006. I use Rangoon and Burma for the period prior to 2006 and Yangon and Myanmar for the period thereafter. In addition, I have removed the name of any activist currently in Myanmar due to the recent policy of executing political prisoners. On 1 February 2021, Myanmar was again plunged into political turmoil when the military illegally overthrew the country’s democratically elected government. This is the third time Myanmar, formally known as Burma, has been subject to a coup d’état; violent seizures of power took place in 1962 and in 1988-90. While those two earlier military governments met with opposition spearheaded by students and student organisations, in 2021 the military faced organised resistance through a mass Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) initiated by government healthcare workers who refused to come to work. They were joined by private sector “strikes” and, perhaps most visible of all to western viewers, mass street demonstrations “led” by “Gen Z” activists—young people who had come of age during Myanmar’s brief decade of democracy. There is little doubt that the success of the CDM and associated protests is due to the widespread coverage and reach of social media as well as the creative communications skills of the country’s first “generation of digital natives”, who are sufficiently familiar and comfortable with social platforms to “participate and shape their identities in communication and dialogue with global digital media content” (Jordt et al. 12 ). The leveraging of global culture, including the use of English in protest signs, was notable in garnering international media coverage and so keeping Myanmar’s political plight front-of-mind with governments around the world. Yet this is not the whole story behind the effectiveness of these campaigns. As Lisa Brooten argues, contemporary networks are built on “decades of behind-the-scenes activism to build a multi-ethnic civil society” (East Asia Forum). The leading democracy activist, Min Ko Naing, aligned “veteran activists from previous generations with novice Gen Z activists”, declaring “this revolution represents a combination of Generations X, Y and Z in fighting against the military dictatorship’” (Jordt et al. 18). Similarly, the creative strategies used by 2021’s digital campaigners also build on protests by earlier generations of young, creative people. This paper looks at two creative protest across the generations. The first is “secret” fashion photography of the late 1970s collected in Lukas Birk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 – Fashion=Resistance. The second is the contemporary #100projectors campaign, a “projection project for Myanmar democracy movement against the military dictatorship” (in the interest of full disclosure, I took part in the #100projectors project). Drawing from the contemporary advertising principle of “segmentation”, the communications practice where potential consumers are divided into “subgroups … based on specific characteristics and needs” (WARC 1), as well as contemporary thinking on the “aesthetics” of “cosmopolitanism”, (Papastergiadis, Featherstone, and Christensen), I argue that contemporary creative strategies can be traced back to the creative tactics of resistance employed by earlier generations of protesters and their re-imagining of “national space and its politics” (Christensen 556) in the interstices of cosmopolitan Rangoon, Burma, and Yangon, Myanmar. #100projectors Myanmar experienced two distinct periods of military rule, the Socialist era between 1962 and 1988 under General Ne Win and the era under the State Law and Order Restoration Council – State Peace and Development Council between 1988 and 2011. These were followed by a semi-civilian era from 2011 to 2021 (Carlson 117). The coup in 2021 marks a return to extreme forms of control, censorship, and surveillance. Ne Win’s era of military rule saw a push for Burmanisation enforced through “significant cultural restrictions”, ostensibly to protect national culture and unity, but more likely to “limit opportunities for internal dissent” (Carlson 117). Cultural restrictions applied to art, literature, film, television, as well as dress. Despite these prohibitions, in the 1970s Rangoon's young people smuggled in illegal western fashion magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue, and commissioned local tailors to make up the clothes they saw there. Bell-bottoms, mini-skirts, western-style suits were worn in “secret” fashion shoots, with the models posing for portraits at Rangoon photographic studios such as the Sino-Burmese owned Har Si Yone in Chinatown. Some of the wealthier fashionistas even came for weekly shoots. Demand was so high, a second branch devoted to these photographic sessions was opened with its own stock of costumes and accessories. Copies of these head to toe fashion portraits, printed on 12 x 4 cm paper, were shared with friends and family; keeping portrait albums was a popular practice in Burma and had been since the 1920s and 30s (Birk, Burmese Photographers 113). The photos that survive this era are collected in Lukas Birk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 – Fashion=Resistance. #100projectors was launched in February 2021 by a group of young visual and video artists with the aim of resisting the coup and demanding the return of democracy. Initially a small group of projectionists or “projector fighters”, as the title suggests they plan to amplify their voices by growing their national and international network to 100. #100projectors is one of many campaigns, movements, and fundraisers devised by artists and creatives to protest the coup and advocate for revolution in Myanmar. Other notable examples, all run by Gen Z activists, include the Easter Egg, Watermelon, Flash, and Marching Shoes strikes. The Marching Shoe Strike, which featured images of flowers in shoes, representing those who had died in protests, achieved a reach of 65.2 million in country with 1.4 million interactions across digital channels (VERO, 64) and all of these campaigns were covered by the international press, including The Guardian, Reuters, The Straits Times, and VOA East Asia Pacific Session, as well as arts magazines around the world (for example Hyperallergic, published in Brooklyn). #100projectors material has been projected in Finland, Scotland, and Australia. The campaign was written about in various art magazines and their Video #7 was screened at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in February 2022 as part of Defiant Art: A Year of Resistance to the Myanmar Coup. At first glance, these two examples seem distant in both their aims and achievements. Fashion photos, taken in secret and shared privately, could be more accurately described as a grassroots social practice rather than a political movement. While Birk describes the act of taking these images as “a rebellion” and “an escape” in a political climate when “a pair of flowers and a pair of sunglasses might just start a revolution”, the fashionistas’ photographs seem “ephemeral” at best, or what Mina Roces describes as the subtlest form of resistance or ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott in Roces 7). By contrast, #100projectors has all the hallmarks of a polished communications campaign. They have a logo and slogans: “We fight for light” and “The revolution must win”. There is a media plan, which includes the use of digital channels, encrypted messaging, live broadcasts, as well as in-situ projections. Finally, there is a carefully “targeted” audience of potential projectionists. It is this process of defining a target audience, based on segmentation, that is particularly astute and sophisticated. Traditionally, segmentation defined audiences based on demographics, geodemographics, and self-identification. However, in the online era segments are more likely to be based on behaviour and activities revealed in search data as well as shares, depending on preferences for privacy and permission. Put another way, as a digital subject, “you are what you choose to share” (WARC 1). The audience for #100projectors includes artists and creative people around the world who choose to share political video art. They are connected through digital platforms including Facebook as well as encrypted messaging. Yet this contemporary description of digital subjectivity, “you are what you choose to share”, also neatly describes the Yangon fashionistas and the ways in which they resist the political status quo. Photographic portraits have always been popular in Burma and so this collection does not look especially radical. Initially, the portraits seem to speak only about status, taste, and modernity. Several subjects within the collection are shown in national or ethnic dress, in keeping with the governments edict that Burma consisted of 135 ethnicities and 8 official races. In addition, there is a portrait of a soldier in full uniform. But the majority of the images are of men and women in “modern” western gear typical of the 1970s. With their wide smiles and careful poses, these men and women look like they’re performing sophisticated worldliness as well as showing off their wealth. They are cosmopolitan adepts taking part in international culture. Status is implicit in the accessories, from sunglasses to jewellery. One portrait is shot at mid-range so that it clearly features a landline phone. In 1970s Burma, this was an object out of reach for most. Landlines were both prohibitively expensive and reserved for the true elites. To make a phone call, most people had to line up at special market stalls. To be photographed with a phone, in western clothes (to be photographed at all), seems more about aspiration than anarchy. In the context of Ne Win’s Burma, however, the portraits clearly capture a form of political agency. Burma had strict edicts for dress and comportment: kissing in public was banned and Burmese citizens were obliged to wear Burmese dress, with western styles considered degenerate. Long hair, despite being what Burmese men traditionally wore prior to colonisation, was also deemed too western and consequently “outlawed” (Edwards 133). Dress was not only proscribed but hierarchised and heavily gendered; only military men had “the right to wear trousers” (Edwards 133). Public disrespect of the all-powerful, paranoid, and vindictive military (known as “sit tat” for military or army versus “Tatmadaw” for the good Myanmar army) was dangerous bordering on the suicidal. Consequently, wearing shoulder-length hair, wide bell bottoms, western-style suits, and “risqué” mini-skirts could all be considered acts of at least daring and definitely defiance. Not only are these photographs a challenge to gender constructions in a country ruled by a hyper-masculine army, but these images also question the nature of what it meant to be Burmese at a time when Burmeseness itself was rigidly codified. Recording such acts on film and then sharing the images entailed further risk. Thus, these models are, as Mina Roces puts it, “express[ing] their agency through sartorial change” (Roces 5). Fig. 2: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit dress and hair. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Fig. 3: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Roces also notes the “challenge” of making protest visible in spaces “severely limited” under authoritarian regimes (Roces 10). Burma under the Socialist government was a particularly difficult place in which to mount any form of resistance. Consequences included imprisonment or even execution, as in the case of the student leader Tin Maung Oo. Ma Thida, a writer and human rights advocate herself jailed for her work, explains the use of creative tools such as metaphor in a famous story about a crab by the writer and journalist Hanthawaddy U Win Tin: The crab, being hard-shelled, was well protected and could not be harmed. However, the mosquito, despite being a far smaller animal, could bite the eyes of the crab, leading to the crab’s eventual death. ... Readers drew the conclusion that the socialist government of Ne Win was the crab that could be destabilized if a weakness could be found. (Thida 317) If the metaphor of a crab defeated by a mosquito held political meaning, then being photographed in prohibited fashions was a more overt way of making defiance and resistant “visible”. While that visibility seems ephemeral, the fashionistas also found a way not only to be seen by the camera in their rebellious clothing, but also by a “public” or audience of those with whom they shared their images. The act of exchanging portraits, what Birk describes as “old-school Instagram”, anticipates not only the shared selfie, but also the basis of successful contemporary social campaigns, which relied in part on networks sharing posts to amplify their message (Birk, Yangon Fashion 17). What the fashionistas also demonstrate is that an act of rebellion can also be a means of testing the limits of conformity, of the need for beauty, of the human desire to look beautiful. Acts of rebellion are also acts of celebration and so, solidarity. Fig. 4: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit dress length. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Fig. 5: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit trousers. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. As the art critic and cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis writes, “the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art could be defined as an aesthetic of openness that engenders a global sense of inter-connectedness” (207). Inter-connectedness and its possibilities and limits shape the aesthetic imaginary of both the secret fashion shoots of 1970s Rangoon and the artists and videographers of 2021. In the videos of the #100projectors project and the fashion portraits of stylish Rangoonites, interconnection comes as a form of aesthetic blending, a conversation that transcends the border. The sitter posing in illicit western clothes in a photo studio in the heart of Rangoon, then Burma’s capital and seat of power, cannot help but point out that borders are permeable, and that national identity is temporally-based, transitory, and full of slippages. In this spot, 40-odd years earlier, Burmese nationalists used dress as a means of publicly supporting the nationalist cause (Edwards, Roces). Like the portraits, the #100projector videos blend global and local perspectives on Myanmar. Combining paintings, drawings, graphics, performance art recordings, as well as photography, the work shares the ‘instagrammable’ quality of the Easter Egg, Watermelon, and Marching Shoes strikes with their bright colours and focus on people—or the conspicuous lack of people and the example of the Silent Strike. Graphics are in Burmese as well as English. Video #6 was linked to International Women’s Day. Other graphics reference American artists such as Shepherd Fairey and his Hope poster, which was adapted to feature Aung San Suu Kyi’s face during then-President Obama’s visit in 2012. The videos also include direct messages related to political entities such as Video #3, which voiced support for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hlutaw (CRPH), a group of 15 elected MPs who represented the ideals of Gen Z youth (Jordt et al., viii). This would not necessarily be understood by an international viewer. Also of note is the prevalence of the colour red, associated with Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD. Red is one of the three “political” colours formerly banned from paintings under SLORC. The other two were white, associated with the flowers Aung Sang Suu Kyi wore in her hair, and black, symbolic of negative feelings towards the regime (Carlson, 145). The Burmese master Aung Myint chose to paint exclusively in the banned colours as an ongoing act of defiance, and these videos reflect that history. The videos and portraits may propose that culturally, the world is interconnected. But implicit in this position is also the failure of “interconnectedness”. The question that arises with every viewing of a video or Instagram post or Facebook plea or groovy portrait is: what can these protesters, despite the risks they are prepared to take, realistically expect from the rest of the world in terms of help to remove the unwanted military government? Interconnected or not, political misfortune is the most effective form of national border. Perhaps the most powerful imaginative association with both the #100projectors video projections and fashionistas portraits is the promise of transformation, in particular the transformations possible in a city like Rangoon / Yangon. In his discussion of the cosmopolitan space of the city, Christensen notes that although “digital transformations touch vast swathes of political, economic and everyday life”, it is the city that retains supreme significance as a space not easily reducible to an entity beneath the national, regional, or global (556). The city is dynamic, “governed by the structural forces of politics and economy as well as moralities and solidarities of both conservative and liberal sorts”, where “othered voices and imaginaries find presence” in a mix that leads to “contestations” (556). Both the fashionistas and the video artists of the #100projectors use their creative work to contest the ‘national’ space from the interstices of the city. In the studio these transformations of the bodies of Burmese subjects into international “citizens of the world” contest Ne Win’s Burma and reimagine the idea of nation. They take place in the Chinatown, a relic of the old, colonial Rangoon, a plural city and one of the world’s largest migrant ports, where "mobility, foreignness and cross-cultural hybridity" were essential to its make-up (Aung Thin 778). In their instructions on how to project their ideas as a form of public art to gain audience, the #100projectors artists suggest projectors get “full on creative with other ways: projecting on people, outdoor cinema, gallery projection” (#100projectors). It is this idea projection as an overlay, a doubling of the everyday that evokes the possibility of transformation. The #100projector videos screen on Rangoon bridges, reconfiguring the city, albeit temporarily. Meanwhile, Rangoon is doubled onto other cities, towns, villages, communities, projected onto screens but also walls, fences, the sides of buildings in Finland, Scotland, Australia, and elsewhere. Conclusion In this article I have compared the recent #100projectors creative campaign of resistance against the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar with the “fashionistas” of 1970 and their “secret” photo shoots. While the #100projectors is a contemporary digital campaign, some of the creative tactics employed, such as dissemination and identifying audiences, can be traced back to the practices of Rangoon’s fashionistas of the 1970s. ­­Creative resistance begins with an act of imagination. The creative strategies of resistance examined here share certain imaginative qualities of connection, a privileging of the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘interconnectedness’ as well as the transformativity of actual space, with the streets of Rangoon, itself a cosmopolitan city. References @100projectors Instagram account. <https://www.instagram.com/100projectors/>. @Artphy_1 Instagram account. <https://www.instagram.com/artphy_1/>. 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