Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Despite their authoritarian tendencies, the current regimes in Russia and China have both actively promoted stronger civil societies. This article explores this apparent paradox for insights both into the meaning of civil society and into the nature of governance in these two regimes. It argues that the social organizations that make up civil society both inhabit and construct a public sphere where individuals assist in their own governance. Recognizing that administered societies cannot compete in a globalizing economy, these regimes look to social organizations to perform functions previously left to the state, but at the same time use similar repertoires of regulation, revenue control, and repression to ensure such organizations do not transgress acceptable boundaries. Still, different notions of state–society relations in the two countries have led to different patterns of social organizations in the two countries. In Russia, a sharp distinction between state and society has contributed to a government strategy that seeks to dominate the public sphere leaving little room for autonomous civic action. In China, by contrast, deeply embedded institutionalized accounts see state and society as overlapping spheres of activity, creating pyramid-like structures encompassing both state-based and more autonomous organizations, and allowing more room for negotiation between the two.

This article explores the construction of a century-old cultural trauma on social media today. After first mapping the history of a cultural trauma and its memorialization, the article proceeds to examine its construction on social media. Drawing both on the literature on cultural trauma and digital media and on scholarship on “dark” tourism and social media, the article argues that while the literature on cultural trauma discusses digital media as an alternative space for the articulation of contesting narratives against the mainstream media and the state, the role of social media in encouraging solidarity in cultural trauma-making between different institutional and noninstitutional actors also requires exploration. Without undermining the participatory potential of digital media, the article calls for further research on how social media affordances such as commercial practices and algorithms can influence the content of cultural trauma narratives online. The essay reconceptualizes the role of intellectuals and experts in the articulation of cultural trauma by suggesting that, in the digital age, everyone becomes a carrier of a cultural trauma narrative. Empirically, the article focuses on the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 and the mediation on Instagram of its national memorial site in Kyiv. It studies how social media users discuss the historical tragedy, its victims, and its perpetrators through uploaded images from an offline memorial site to an online platform. The article concludes by calling for further research into the mediation of historical events on social media.

Far from activism in formal groups or in visible and vocal demonstrations stands a type of citizen participation observed through everyday practices and daily activities in the public sphere. Targeted citizen actions in urban spaces, dumpster diving, responsible consumption movements or small acts of everyday resistance are all examples of what we call informal modes of participation. Such initiatives are not new, nor do they pertain to a particular geographic arena. However, it is only recently that social scientists have started to pay attention to such activities: scholars from urban studies, development studies, political sociology, and critical geography have started to address this phenomenon. After discussing the existing literature on this topic, this introduction proceeds to define and operationalize the concept of informal participation, while also providing a common analytical framework for dialogue among the six contributions to this special issue briefly described in the last section below.

Despite women’s increasing participation in the labour market and attempts to transform the traditional gendered division of work, domestic and care work is still perceived as women’s terrain. This work continues to be invisible in terms of the organisation of production or productive value and domestic and care work continues to be unpaid or low paid. Taking domestic and care work as an expression of the feminisation of labour, this article will attempt to complicate this analysis by first exploring a queer critique of feminisation, and second, by situating feminisation within the context of the coloniality of power. Drawing on research conducted in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK on the organisation of domestic work in private households, the article will conclude with some observations on the interconnectedness of feminisation, heteronormativity and the coloniality of power in the analysis of the expansion of precarity in the EU zone.

This article reflects on the relationship between time and the figure of the citizen, where the citizen is understood in relational terms to the migrant. The article examines a stalled or interrupted flow of time that characterises the experience of certain migrants and citizens alike. This is time experienced as waiting for the fulfillment of citizenship. The article goes on to show how a progressive temporal narrative of citizenship-to-come obscures the effective denial of citizenship. While citizenship remains a key aspiration for those who lack its full or partial protections, it may not represent the ultimate horizon for struggles concerned with questions of border justice. With this proposition in mind, the article speculates on alternative horizons that may be emerging organically within struggles that refuse the citizen/migrant divide as a basis for imagining collective political futures.