Politics is a slippery research object – for sociologists, at least. Sometimes we envy the relatively easier life of the political scientist: to observe elections, parliamentary deliberations, or proper manifestos, and you know you are dealing with politics. For us sociologists, the analysis of politics is more arduous, especially from a cultural point of view. For cultural sociology, the analysis of politics probably consists more in a distinctive way of analysing the world as it is (and addressing the question of why it is the way it is), than it is about systematically studying circumscribed, predefined sets or spheres of action.
But if the study of politics in cultural and political sociology means looking for politics also outside of existing, taken-for granted institutions, it is equally interested in dimensions of politics which cannot be reduced to a rational, political and institutional game. By way of example, politics is in some ways a profession like any other. For political ‘practitioners’, politics may appear as merely a job. You get up every morning, kiss your children, and go to work, engaging in parliamentary debates or whatnot. But if this is the case, if politics also includes the dimension of being ‘merely a job’, then we may want to grasp the complex dynamics of politics through the analysis of what it means to do a high-pressure expert job nowadays. And we may want to attempt to evaluate the impact of an ethics of efficiency and productivity on the overall political process (as the contribution of Mona Mannevuo does in this issue). For others, politics is literally a matter of life and death. When undocumented migrants protest, seek representation, and try to ground their claims-making (as investigated in the article by Minke Hajer and Christian Bröer), politics becomes something with much more ‘skin in the game’ than an understanding of politics as a professionalised, parliamentary activity, with its gentlemanly battle of wits (in the best of cases), or the lofty ideal of politics as a practice in which the common good is held high, would allow for.
Politics can become a similar game of high stakes also for activists with less precarious situations: for some, politics means plunging head-first into a life in a protest camp for weeks – living and breathing the struggle for a better world, committed both in body and in mind (as is explored by Dekker & Duyvendak in this issue). And yet, for others, it means a decades-long process of communication and forging of common places, a process of creating community through literally planting seeds and tending bushes (as Christensen shows us).
Fighting for justice and imagining social justice link normative orientations and societal struggles beyond specific countries. US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on 18 September, finally losing her battle with cancer. Her death creates a huge feeling of loss and sadness across the globe about this feminist icon of anti-discrimination struggles and legal fighter for social justice in the Unitied States. One of her famous sentences ‘When contemplated in its extreme, almost any power looks dangerous’, captures the very contemporary struggle between the rise of authoritarian politics, and the defenders of equality and social justice.
In this issue, we approach these different sides of doing politics – which for the people involved always means trying to make the world a better place on some level. Politics has many flavours, and we pride ourselves in sampling them all in this journal. The four papers we have in this issue are a testament to this broadness of palate.
Mona Mannevuo undertakes a cultural-sociological approach towards the work culture of professional elites, that is members of parliament, in the contribution ‘The art of political rationality: sensible sentimentalism in the Finnish Parliament’. While the focus is on well-researched institutionalised, formal politics, the dimension of the analysis is in itself highly under-researched, that is, the dimension of politicians’ work practices and pressure, as well as well-being. An emphasis on techniques of productivity and efficiency, ‘affective infrastructures’, as well as related ‘mindsets’ and work ethics – more frequently the object of economic-sociological and labour market studies – is brought to bear here to the study of parliamentary politics, fleshing out a picture of rationalised politics and resilience as a main approach of individual survival.
Minke Hajer and Christian Bröer, in their article ‘We are here! Claim-making and claim-placing of undocumented migrants in Amsterdam’, investigate the politics of actors who are hardly included in formalised and institutionalised politics and lack the actual rights to make political claims. Their focus is on the struggle for citizenship by excluded and marginalised undocumented migrants in the urban settings of Amsterdam. Hajek and Bröer put Arendt’s notion of the ‘right to have rights’ in practice, showing how human rights are frequently part of prolonged struggle and activism, rather than simply being attributed to individuals ‘from above’. Particularly interesting is Hajek and Bröer’s analysis of not only ‘claim making’, but also ‘claim placing’, as a spatial form of protest and political struggle. Hajek and Bröer’s analysis contributes importantly to the political-sociological analysis of differentiated citizenship (cf. Nash, 2009) as well as to cultural-sociological studies of meaning-making through political practices, in this case by means of urban, spatial dimensions.
Mischa Dekker and Jan-Willem Duyvendak, in their article Encampment controversies: Occupy Wall Street and Intimate Protest ask how the encampment – perhaps one of the defining modes of protesting of the past decade – works as a form of politics, that connects the bodily, the everyday, and sometimes rather conflictual political processes. The combinations of the bodily and the political create questions of legitimacy, even if everything happens by the book and the local authorities are on board. The protesters need different devices to alleviate these legitimacy problems. Or as Dekker and Duyvendak put it, the personal is political but don’t call it out.
How should we understand the longer-term coordination between civic society and municipal governance? This is one of the questions Anette Gravgaard Christensen asks in her article ‘Composing urban green collaboration: Exploring coordination in long-term civic-municipal greenspace planning’. Her article, based on thorough ethnography, follows the residents of a small danish municipality as they try to navigate their collaboration with the governance and built greenspaces that would be something more than pretty to look at. She proposes that this was possible because of something she calls imbricated coordination: contrary to what one could believe, it is exactly the fact that this kind of collaboration requires different things in different times, and tries to fold together a multiplicity of interest and valuations, that makes it possible in the long term. Instead of isolated struggles, we find continuous creation of commonalities.
We end this issue with three book reviews; the first is Rūta Kazlauskaitė’ reflective essay on Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-Enactment, Hermeneutics and Education by Tyson Retz. In different ways this book illustrates the notion of politics when considering that our understanding of history as well as of empathy is embedded in situated national contexts. Though the book concentrates on the role of empathy in the field of education, the differing interpretations of empathy merely as individual emotion or an expertise of reason collectively learned and culturally framed, link to other disciplines. As Kazlauskaitė points out ‘there is a need to develop a comprehensive pedagogical concept of historical empathy that integrates cognitive and affective engagement with the past and which aids students in navigating the ever more complex terrain of competing narratives’. As we are witnessing history in the making, the critical reading of the past (against hegemonic narratives) is in dire need. The book might be of interest to international colleagues beyond the education discipline as it engages with English (Collingwood) and German (Gadamer) distinctive approaches to hermeneutics, conceptually and here, after all with philosophy.
The second book, also engaging with history, is Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster, by Guy Beiner, read and discussed by Emily Mitchell-Bajic. The reviewer lives in Belfast, and Buyner’s argument on the ‘forgetful remembrance’ of the 1789 Rebellion in Ireland, is approached through the reflection on the visceral presence or absence of knowledge and representation of the Rebellion in this regard. Silencing particular elements of the past are interwoven with power hierarchies and competing narratives; the symbolism of ‘red poppies’, for example, for the English history of war and victory, is a contested issue between the English and the Irish, mirroring the unresolved differing past and memories of violence, conflict and social hierarchy, as Mitchell-Bajic argues. Though the focus of the book is on UK-Irish history, the insights of the books of how vernacular history is remembered, might be of interest beyond the Isles.
The third book is The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing by Patrick Hutton, reviewed here by Christina Simko, detailing how a crisis in historiography helped to shape the vibrant interdisciplinary field of ‘memory studies’, in which sociologists have become central players. Simko highlights the three main avenues of this tradition – politics of commemoration, cultural memory, and the relationship between trauma and memory, and ends her review in the underscoring of the commitment to the ‘reality of the past’.