re-divided, the container and stage of political conflict, where formal institutions and non-state movements develop agendas, often aimed at releasing and mobilizing affect, such as ridicule, anger, apathy and indifference. Within this context, urban turmoil is at the same time perceived as a threat and as an opportunity and its legacy equally demonised and mythologized.
Inhabitants of Athens are as familiar with the poetics of paralysis as they are accustomed to the violence that often accompanies it; inertia and upheaval seem to take turns as protagonists in the urban life, feeding into the collective imagination. Reactions to paralysis range from voices of confusion to resignation, to protest and anger. Such was the case last December, when residents of Athens, Greeks and immigrants alike, with diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds took to the streets to protest against state violence after the murder of a teenager by a policeman in the centre of Athens. In the following weeks, the city was shaken by a wave of violent rallies, during which agents and symbols of government, nationalism
and capitalism were targeted and public space reclaimed by those previously excluded from it. The events were preceded by a long period of silence, when inhabitants of the capital were portrayed by the mainstream media as disaffected with formal “politics”, refusing to engage with the “state” and retrieving instead to their own private spheres. The interchangeable discourses of apathy and anger employed by the media became prevalent and were subsequently adopted and reformulated by a large part of the citizens themselves, but also state institutions and representatives.
The conditions and processes that led to the December events, may have brought Athens to the fore, but are not specific to Greece. Indeed, rapid urbanisation across the world has forced new relationships between citizen and state, mediated and articulated by rapidly growing and changing cities. The city acts both as the seat of government and as site of resistance but rapid growth and a changing population reconfigures the very notion of citizenship, challenges what is the public and the private and calls for other modes of participation in its political affairs.
Submissions may deal with the theme from various disciplinary perspectives and may be about (but not restricted to) the following:
- The contestation of urban public space;
- Negotiation between the urban margins and the centre, between the formal and the informal, between local residents with recognised rights and those excluded from the right to the city;
- Politics of apathy and anger in the city: processes of radicalisation and the generation of multiple articulations of violence;
- The inscription of memory, the traces of uprisings on the city.
Essays should be approximately *1,500 – 1,800 words *.
Please submit contributions in any electronic format to guest editors of the special issue Gia Galati and Kostantis Kastrissianakis
e-mail: < giagalati AT hotmail.com > and < kostak7 AT gmail.com >
Deadline for submissions: *Friday, 15 January 2010*
Please quote 10 Academic Resources Daily in your application to this opportunity!
