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Why did Hong Kong protestors choose a symbol of former oppression – the old colonial flag – as a banner for their fight for democracy, rights and autonomy in 2019? We propose to answer this puzzle by studying the colonial-era flag as a displacement device. The waving of the colonial-era flag is shown to induce non-linear temporal and extraterritorial displacements, as well as contradictory interpretations of Hong Kong's core values, national sovereignty and cultural identity. The flag's displacements are amplified against the contested colonial history of the former British enclave. Conceptually, this pragmatic definition of the flag moves beyond approaches that study flags as representations of a structure of symbolic meaning. The flag is neither an unimportant prop nor is it a free-floating signifier; its materiality elicits significant political effects. Methodologically, this translates into an exploration of the flag's second-order agency. The old colonial-era Hong Kong flag, in combination with discourse and institutional arrangements, is shown to be integral to contentious politics. The flag and its displacements shed new light on a city uneasy with its past, dissatisfied with its present and uncertain about its future.

AbstractA number of issues have emerged related to how platforms moderate and mitigate "harm." Although platforms have recently developed more explicit policies in regard to what constitutes "hate speech" and "harmful content," it appears that platforms often use subjective judgments of harm that specifically pertains to spectacular, physical violence—but harm takes on many shapes and complex forms. The politics of defining "harm" and "violence" within these platforms are complex and dynamic, and represent entrenched histories of how control over these definitions extends to people's perceptions of them. Via a critical discourse analysis of policy documents from three major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube), we argue that platforms' narrow definitions of harm and violence are not just insufficient but result in these platforms engaging in a form of symbolic violence. Moreover, the platforms position harm as a floating signifier, imposing conceptions of not just what violence is and how it manifests, but who it impacts. Rather than changing the mechanisms of their design that enable harm, the platforms reconfigure intentionality and causality to try to stop users from being "harmful," which, ironically, perpetuates harm. We provide a number of suggestions, namely a restorative justice‐focused approach, in addressing platform harm.

AbstractThe Least Eligibility Principle (LEP) has been variously engaged throughout US history to sort service populations into the deserving and undeserving. The no-frills prison policy movement of the 1990s was heavily influenced by LEP morality. Food was one focal point of the discourses and policies that negotiated the floating signifier "least" to place prisoners at the bottom of the presumed hierarchy, encouraging a punitive penal diet. Based on ethnographic data collected from a US prison for women, I explore women's practices that negotiate their relationship to this diet. Following Abu-Lughod's (1990) suggestion, I consider these daily acts of resistance to reveal the workings of power. The hollowed-out diet disciplines as it presupposes the moral classification of LEP, indexing the unworthiness of those who must consume it. The impacts of the disciplinary diet are far-reaching, encouraging the accumulation of debt while incarcerated and placing unyielding financial pressure on incarcerated individuals' kin networks. State and civil society are continuous in the ideological negotiation that supports the punitive penal diet. Women's practices that challenge the moral implications of this diet claim humanity and dignity in a system that presupposes their unworthiness and positions them as morally bankrupt.

Since the 1960s, the concepts of the 'global' and the 'transnational' have challenged the state-centred orientation of several disciplines. By 1989, the 'global' contained sufficient ambiguity and conceptual promise to emerge as a potentially new central concept to replace the conventional notion of modernity. The consequences of the 1989 revolutions for this emerging concept were extensive. As a result of the post-communist 'New World Order', a new vision of a single triumphant political and economic system was put forward. With the 'globalizing of modernity' as a description of the post-1989 reality, 'globalization' became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when 'anti-globalization' activists were able to question the salience of this dominant theory of 'globalization'. In scholarly discussion, 'globalization' became a floating signifier to be filled with a variety of disciplinary and political meanings. In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred 'globalization' has been conceptually linked to cosmopolitanism while it has played a minor role in the multiple modernities agenda. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of the 'global' in theory and research.

For many, shifting economic and social contexts have created the conditions for a radical reappraisal of the orthodox image of the 'sustainable city'. However, in assessing such potentialities, there is insufficient knowledge about the way in which local actors construct, live out and are gripped by this signifier. This article responds to this deficit by exploring how key actors engaged in urban development actually interpret the challenges of the 'sustainable city'. In part, using a Q-methodology study in Bristol and Grenoble, we discern and construct three distinctive discourses of the sustainable city, which we name progressive reformism, public localism, and moral stewardship. Our findings challenge previous critiques of sustainable urbanism. We observe no consistent support for mainstream conceptions of sustainable urban development, but neither do we find significant support for entrepreneurial or radical green localist discourses of the sustainable city. Instead, we identify a common indifference to the tenets of ecological modernization (and, by extension, entrepreneurialism), and a shared skepticism of local self-sufficiency. We thus argue that such discourses offer uncertain foundations upon which to construct new visions of the 'sustainable city'. In our view, this is because of the transformation of the 'sustainable city' from a relatively fixed idea into a floating signifier, coupled with the practices of local practitioners as policy bricoleurs. We conclude that efforts to develop new visions of 'sustainable cities' are best served by fostering an agonistic ethos of 'pragmatic adversarialism' amongst strategic leaders and stakeholders, which foregrounds politics and the right to difference.

For many, shifting economic and social contexts have created the conditions for a radical reappraisal of the orthodox image of the 'sustainable city'. However, in assessing such potentialities, there is insufficient knowledge about the way in which local actors construct, live out and are gripped by this signifier. This article responds to this deficit by exploring how key actors engaged in urban development actually interpret the challenges of the 'sustainable city'. In part, using a Q methodology study in Bristol and Grenoble, we discern and construct three distinctive discourses of the sustainable city, which we name progressive reformism, public localism, and moral stewardship. Our findings challenge previous critiques of sustainable urbanism. We observe no consistent support for mainstream conceptions of sustainable urban development, but neither do we find significant support for entrepreneurial or radical green localist discourses of the sustainable city. Instead, we identify a common indifference to the tenets of ecological modernization (and, by extension, entrepreneurialism), and a shared skepticism of local self-sufficiency. We thus argue that such discourses offer uncertain foundations upon which to construct new visions of the 'sustainable city'. In our view, this is because of the transformation of the 'sustainable city' from a relatively fixed idea into a floating signifier, coupled with the practices of local practitioners as policy bricoleurs. We conclude that efforts to develop new visions of 'sustainable cities' are best served by fostering an agonistic ethos of 'pragmatic adversarialism' amongst strategic leaders and stakeholders, which foregrounds politics and the right to difference.

Основная цель статьи состоит в том, чтобы проанализировать центральные положения постмарксистской социальной онтологии Э. Лакло и Ш. Муфф и на ее примере показать, что происходящий в современной социальной теории отказ от эссенциалистских и холистских трактовок общества приводит к радикальному переосмыслению роли и значения политики. В статье рассматриваются основные понятия концепции Э. Лакло и Ш. Муфф, такие, как «общее поле дискурсивности», «логика различия», «логика эквивалентности», «узловая точка», «плавающее означающее», «антагонизм» и др. Особое внимание уделяется понятию гегемонии, которое в данной концепции обозначает универсальный политический механизм установления общества. Делается вывод о том, что основным следствием разработки постмарксистской социальной онтологии становится понимание политики как активности, первичной по отношению к любым социальным практикам и институтам.The main goal of the article is to analyze the basic postulates of E. Laclau and Ch. Mouff's post-marxist social ontology. The conception in question is regarded as an example of the progressive abandonment of essentialist and holistic views on society in contemporary social theory that results in radical rethinking of the role and significance of politics. In the article the basic notions of the conception in question are considered, such as «general field of discursivity», «logic of difference», «logic of equivalence», «nodal point», «floating signifier», «antagonism» etc. Special attention is paid to the concept of hegemony which signifies the universal political mechanism of establishment of society. The conclusion is made that the principal implication of post-marxist social ontology is interpretation of political activity as prior to social practices and institutions.

This crónica is really the first time I've written about my childhood. As I've noted elsewhere, I have many black holes—up to my early teens, when things sort of snap into focus. Hi-res focus, even. Although I've lived in and visited a number of countries whose cuisine is imprinted in my memory and even my day-to-day practices in southern California, I decided to focus on only one place: Zapopan (Guadalajara), Jalisco, México, where I spent summers with my family as a young girl. After informally interviewing my sister, Sarita—my closest childhood compinche (she's only 18 months younger)—I decided to take this issue's prompt, the notion of sticky memories/emotions, literally. Stickiness functions as a sensorial structuring motif, recurring in different ways in each of my crónica's four vignettes. However, as is my wont, it offers no sense of resolution or closure. Rather, it appears as a floating signifier: these memories of scent, taste, feel and place have "stuck" with me throughout my life, but they evoke neither univocal nor consistent feelings. The same image or memory can feel now comforting, now disquieting, homely yet uncanny, familiar yet alien. Ultimately, it is this ecotonic, interstitial modus vivendi, which I've been inhabiting since about age four, that I hope to convey to the reader.

Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, "militias" weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the basis and not only the outcome of spatial claims to power. To sustain this contribution, I turn to local scales and add insights from ethnographic studies on how paramilitary groups affect the lives of residents. I trace the paramilitary influence along their terrain-shaping and urban development activities. The empirical basis of my argument is drawn from the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, looking at how "militias"—emerging as armed developers out of a past as Death Squads—expand their influence by investing in urban development. In this paper, "militia" is conceived as a floating signifier. As such, the meaning of militia is contested, as it encompasses a wide range of practices including civil construction, laying infrastructure, and landscaping. This way, the term "militia" becomes a cornerstone of a militarized urban development discourse and practice. "Militia," as the encompassing center of a narrative cluster, bolsters bellicose forms of governing urban expansion, thereby further militarizing the everyday life of a large part of the marginalized urban society.

Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figure -- Chapter 1: Introduction: How to Approach This Book -- The Road from Here -- Chapter 2: Historical and Conceptual Preparations for a Multidisciplinary Study of Social Justice in Iran -- The War's "Blessing" -- Iran's (Hidden) Nietzschean Revolution -- Privatization of Iranian Economy -- Rise of the New Public Discourse -- Clearance of Social Justice -- Social Justice: The Floating Signifier -- Conclusions -- References -- Chapter 3: Gazing Upon the Land of Oil Through the Prism of Structure, Elite Action, and Civil Society -- From Rentierism to Authoritarianism: A One-Way Street? -- What About Iran? -- Structural Level -- Economic Structure -- Political Structure -- Action-Oriented Policies -- Civil Society -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4: The Unmaking of the Iranian Working Class since the 1990s -- Weakening of the Individual Bargaining Power of Workers -- Labour Casualization -- Exclusion of Small Workshops from the Labour Code -- The Rise of Human Resource Contract Firms -- Contracting Out State Employment Umbrella -- Atomizing Effect on the Workers' Weakened Individual Bargaining Power -- Weakening of the Collective Bargaining Power of Workers -- 1. No Right of Organization for the Unemployed -- 2. No Right of Organization for the Employed Workers of the Large Public Firms -- 3. No Right of Organization for Workers Employed in Small Workshops -- 4. Dependency on Employers -- 5. Dependency on the Government -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 5: Charity or Mass Mobilization? Public Religion and the Struggle for Economic Justice -- Faith and Justice in Comparative Frames -- Mobilizational Approach in Shi'i Liberation Theology and Leftist Islamism -- Neoliberal Shift and Proliferation of Charitable Initiatives -- A Return to Mass Mobilization?

This paper focusses on the urban landscape of Naples and on the cultural vitality that has always characterized it. Naples is a complex and contradictory city, with many faces and many nuances. The city does not pause to be framed in a pattern that is unique, rational, firm, but escapes the predictable patterns to become a floating signifier, which moves in a hundred interpretations and a thousand stories. Naples is perhaps the emblem of the city in crisis, of the city as a crisis. As a gate to the South, a virtual bridge which creates openings, breaks and exchanges towards other worlds, as the centre of a strong marginality and spearhead of a cultural universe, Naples is expressed, however and always, as a purposeful and productive place where creativity, from 'other' worlds, allows to mark new tracks, unreleased cultural and artistic tracks. Tradition and innovation, local and global, particular and universal: without putting together these dimensions, it is not possible to approach the cultural, social and political study of this city. The Neapolitan artistic and cultural production, in its various forms, has always narrated, documented and represented the thousand faces of Naples, its segments, its systems, subsystems, stratifications and changes that have characterized the history of the city. Among the various communication forms, music is an essential active ingredient and resource of meaning in the social construction of people's identities. Therefore, musical languages are a significant indicator of social and cultural transformations, and can be considered as a significant analytical category.

An interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton's satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton's anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk's monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker's biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset's Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America's failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.

In the last decades of the 20th century large-scale migration had a deep influence on the sociopolitical processus all over the world. It became the catalyst of serious changes in sphere of mass consciousness, social structure, political culture, institutionally-legal bases of the state. Simultaneously migration became a subject of political discussions devoted to the protection of the domestic stability, structuring the public order within the welfare state. A key point running through these discussions was that migration became a threat to the national security of the state. The «other» was found within. In such eschatologically simplified world migration became a new subject for the internal security field, a key-issue facilitating the social structuring of the state, overlapping and binding the national security logic with emerging cultural challenges of the welfare state. Migration became a floating signifier, a meta-issue within the european political discourse. In this relation, Finland is no exception. Refusing the policy of forced assimilition prospered during the 20th century, but leaning on historically shaped institutes of the state, to accelerate the process of integration of new ethnic minorities, the government of Finland influenced by the supranational European politics began to implement the politics of controlled inclusion, called as political strategy of multiculturalism. Such process occurred through the securitization of migration makes it possible to suppose, that securitization became an instrument to control the ethnocultural management, to structure the rationality and the logic of modern welfare state.

International audience At a time when the British political scene and media environment have been saturated with references to "the people" and "the people's voice", films may seem the ideal means to question what it means to "represent" something or someone, and reveal how the term of "people", while being overused and misused, offers a floating signifier that conjures up all types of projections. This article focuses on three films whose reception has been skewed by the context of Brexit, and more particularly by the issues related to the referendum and the concomitant political instrumentalisation of the notion of "the people's voice". My contention is that the three films interrogate the very notion of representation, namely what representing a nation and its "people" means. Instead of claiming they convey the "true" voice of the people, each film dramatises the staging of a battle of words, which is thus construed as the essence of the democratic debate. Even more specifically, each film offers a reflection on the political power of words through its cinematographic tools. In each case, albeit with obvious stylistic differences, both mise en scène and montage give a proper dialectical dimension to the film discourse insofar as the narratives are built on a series of ruptures or contrasts that are orchestrated into an organic whole. ; À une époque où la scène politique et l'environnement médiatique britanniques sont saturés de références au « peuple » et à « la voix du peuple », les films semblent être un moyen particulièrement approprié pour s'interroger sur ce que signifie « représenter », et mettre en lumière comment le terme de « peuple », si souvent galvaudé ou exploité à des fins populistes, offre un signifiant flottant qui convoque toutes sortes de projections. Le présent article examine trois films dont la réception a été biaisée par le contexte du Brexit, et plus particulièrement par les questions liées au référendum et à l'instrumentalisation politique concomitante de la notion de « voix du peuple ...

International audience ; At a time when the British political scene and media environment have been saturated with references to "the people" and "the people's voice", films may seem the ideal means to question what it means to "represent" something or someone, and reveal how the term of "people", while being overused and misused, offers a floating signifier that conjures up all types of projections. This article focuses on three films whose reception has been skewed by the context of Brexit, and more particularly by the issues related to the referendum and the concomitant political instrumentalisation of the notion of "the people's voice". My contention is that the three films interrogate the very notion of representation, namely what representing a nation and its "people" means. Instead of claiming they convey the "true" voice of the people, each film dramatises the staging of a battle of words, which is thus construed as the essence of the democratic debate. Even more specifically, each film offers a reflection on the political power of words through its cinematographic tools. In each case, albeit with obvious stylistic differences, both mise en scène and montage give a proper dialectical dimension to the film discourse insofar as the narratives are built on a series of ruptures or contrasts that are orchestrated into an organic whole. ; À une époque où la scène politique et l'environnement médiatique britanniques sont saturés de références au « peuple » et à « la voix du peuple », les films semblent être un moyen particulièrement approprié pour s'interroger sur ce que signifie « représenter », et mettre en lumière comment le terme de « peuple », si souvent galvaudé ou exploité à des fins populistes, offre un signifiant flottant qui convoque toutes sortes de projections. Le présent article examine trois films dont la réception a été biaisée par le contexte du Brexit, et plus particulièrement par les questions liées au référendum et à l'instrumentalisation politique concomitante de la notion de « voix du ...