Suchergebnisse

In this paper, I draw on my experiences doing field research in Cuba, to contribute to the idea that participating in illegal activities is not necessarily unethical. Using a reflexive analysis, I argue that as a foreign researcher in Cuba's dual economy, full participation in Cubans' daily life—though illegal for both the researcher and the participants—was necessary to establish trust. This allowed me to gain social access to the field while allowing participants to spread the risk. Ultimately, it led to a more accurate account of Cubans' daily practices through which I was able to address unbalanced and misinformed interpretations of the island and its people, which is crucial in the midst of highly politicized literature on Cuba.

AbstractScholars and social movements have long studied how cooperative values of solidarity and democracy can spill over to the rest of the society. However, such studies have failed to develop a sociospatial theory of solidarity. Focusing on two types of agricultural cooperatives in Cuba, this paper draws on recent geography literature on solidarity to explore the sociospatial dimensions of cooperative solidarity. We find that cooperatives represent a crucial nexus between grassroots, lived community‐based solidarity practices and top‐down, multiscalar, organized solidarities and act as transformers between mechanical and organic solidarity. Cooperatives may lose their capacity for catalyzing solidarity if market pressure disturbs the sociospatial entanglement of grassroots and top‐down efforts.

Coming to terms with recent insights concerning the (post-) political is a key challenge for transition management. To start with, transition management understands the relation transition initiatives adopt towards existing regimes not in political, but in market terms. This impacts their internal processes, which are based on a deliberative notion of democracy, assuming the existence of a common good and misrecognizing the constitutive role of conflict. Moreover, transition management embraces a governance approach centring on public–private bodies which, in the name of bottom-up processes and participation, especially gives a voice to a privileged group of business, policy and civil society actors. Insofar as citizens get a place, it is merely in their role as consumers. Finally, as it is based on a market model itself, transition management fails to politicize one of the most fundamental current 'landscape' elements. The crucial question is how these features affect transition management's possibilities to contribute to effective and democratic sustainable change.