An exploration of Johannesburg's post-apartheid's city administration's governance of conflict from 1996 to the current day, in the case of service delivery protests and shifts in city policy. The author, Li Pernegger, focuses in-depth on the water wars in Orange Farm, insurgent informal traders in the inner city, and the billing battle fought by the middle class. This book provides deep insights into facets of protests: from the local state's qualification of the conflicts; its portrayals of protestors; its agonistic and antagonistic responses to protestors' claims; to power dynamics and the forms of agreement reached. Pernegger considers what the practical prospects of agonism might be for the local government to regard city strife in its practices of governance as a constructive – rather than destructive – force for change, and the realisation of democratic ideals for its ordinary citizens.

This book offers an empirically-grounded account of the emergence and political activities of a new collective actor in Berlin’s art field. Investigating the organizational and representative practices of Koalition der Freien Szene (Coalition of the Independent Scene) – a trans-disciplinary action platform assembling a wide variety of cultural producers in Berlin – the author unpacks the political organization of one of the most compelling contemporary art scenes, or ‘creative’ cities, worldwide, analysing both its concrete policy ‘success’ and the means by which it seeks to challenge and rearticulate the meaning of Berlin as a ‘creative’ city from the producers’ point of view. The book thus opens new opportunities for long-term transformations of the cultural political field. Theoretically sophisticated and based on empirical material including interviews with spokespeople and cultural administrators, Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City presents a unique conceptualization of new modes of political collectivization, representation and legitimacy that imagine new avenues of political engagement at a time when political institutions, parties and regimes of representation are in crisis. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and urban studies with interests in social movements and cultural activism.

The Hellenistic age witnessed a dynamic increase of cultural fusion and entanglement across the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds. Amid seismic changes in the world writ large, the regions of central Greece and the Peloponnese have often been considered a cultural space left behind. Localism in Hellenistic Greece explores how various processes impacted the countless small-scale, local communities of the Greek mainland. Drawing on notions of locality, localism, local tradition, and boundedness in place, Sheila L. Ager and Hans Beck delve into some of the main hubs of Hellenistic Greece, from Thessaly to Cape Tainaron. Along with their contributors, they explore how polis and ethnos societies positioned themselves in a swiftly expanding horizon and the meaning-making force of the local. The book reveals how local discourses were energized by local sentiments and, much like an echo chamber, how discourses related back to the community and the place it occupied, prioritizing the local as the critical source of communal orientation. Engaging with debates about cultural connectivity and convergence, Localism in Hellenistic Greece offers new insights into lived experience in ancient Greece.

The City on Display: Architecture Festivals and the Urban Commons reflects on the biennials, triennials, and other festivals of architecture and design that have been held over the last two decades, as they expand and transform in response to the exigencies of ‘planetary urbanisation’. Joel Robinson examines the development of these large-scale, international, and perennial exhibitions as they address such challenges as urban regeneration, heritage preservation, climate change, and the migration crisis. Homing in on examples of festivals in Venice, Rotterdam, Oslo, Tallinn, Sharjah, Seoul, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong, the author describes how they alter the public spaces that host them, either through civic boosterism and gentrification, on the one hand, or through a reassertion of the urban commons and the right to the city, on the other hand. He attempts to thematise the architecture festival's relationship with the city and interrogate its potential as a forum for global debate about the emergencies of the urban condition. This book will be beneficial for students and academics of architecture and urbanism, and especially those who have an interest in how the city gets exhibited at such festivals and even reimagined as something other than it currently is.

Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture brings architecture and urbanism into dialogue with phenomenology. Phenomenology has informed debate about the city from social sciences to cultural studies. Within architecture, however, phenomenological inquiry has been neglecting the question of the city. Addressing this lacuna, this book suggests that the city presents not only the richest, but also the politically most urgent horizon of reference for philosophical reflection on the cultural and ethical dimensions of architecture. The contributors to this volume are architects and scholars of urbanism. Some have backgrounds in literature, history, religious studies, and art history. The book features 16 chapters by younger scholars as well as established thinkers including Peter Carl, David Leatherbarrow, Alberto Pérez-Gomez, Wendy Pullan and Dalibor Vesely. Rather than developing a single theoretical statement, the book addresses architecture’s relationship with the city in a wide range of historical and contemporary contexts. The chapters trace hidden genealogies, and explore the ruptures as much as the persistence of recurrent cultural motifs. Together, these interconnected phenomenologies of the city raise simple but fundamental questions: What is the city for, how is it ordered, and how can it be understood? The book does not advocate a return to a naive sense of ’unity’ or ’order’. Rather, it investigates how architecture can generate meaning and forge as well as contest social and cultural representations.

Bats are highly gregarious mammals that have been extensively studied for their ability to echolocate (i.e., gain information from the echoes of ultrasonic calls) to navigate and find food. Perhaps less well studied are social vocalizations, which bats use to communicate with conspecifics. Some bat species have been shown to possess rich vocal repertoires, supporting intricate social interactions. While the roost is likely where the majority of a bat's social interactions occur, on account of higher densities, there are also behavioral contexts that occur predominantly, if not solely in flight, that are associated with social calls. Bats exhibit an extensive range in social group size, social group organization, and mating systems, making them interesting for comparative, phylogenetically controlled analyses. Group size is often correlated with vocal complexity, as more complex vocalizations can encode more information about individual identity. Vocal learning has been observed in some species of bats. The full vocal repertoires of relatively few bat species have been studied thus far, as they are nocturnal, volant animals that produce predominately ultrasonic vocalizations. With more data available, bats would be a very useful taxon for studying the evolution of social communication, as they exhibit not only a high diversity of social group size and complexity but also sophisticated vocalizations. Social vocalizations can be structurally diverse and are highly important for bat sociality. Calls often vary notably between species. Research in this field has barely scratched the surface, and there is still much to learn about social communication in bats.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of how and why athletic contests, a characteristic aspect of Greek culture for over a millennium, disappeared in late antiquity. In contrast to previous discussions, which focus on the ancient Olympics, the end of the most famous games is analyzed here in the context of the collapse of the entire international agonistic circuit, which encompassed several hundred contests. The first part of the book describes this collapse by means of a detailed analysis of the fourth- and fifth-century history of the athletic games in each region of the Mediterranean: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Italy, Gaul and northern Africa. The second half continues by explaining these developments, challenging traditional theories (especially the ban by the Christian emperor Theodosius I) and discussing in detail both the late antique socio-economic context and the late antique perceptions of athletics.

The Ancient Greek notion of agonism, meaning struggle, has been revived in radical legal and political theory to rethematize class conflict and to conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and social transformation in contemporary society. Insisting that what is ultimately at stake in politics are the terms in which social conflict is represented, agonists highlight the importance of the strategic, affective and aesthetic aspects of politics for democratic praxis. This volume examines the implications of this critical perspective for understanding law and considers how law serves either to sustain or curtail the democratic agon. While sharing a critical perspective on the deliberative turn in legal and political theory and its tendency to depoliticize social conflict, the various contributors to this volume diverge in arguing variously for pragmatic, expressivist or strategic conceptions of agonism. In doing so they question the glib assumptions that often underlie a sometimes too easy celebration of conflict as an antidote to de-politicizing consensus. This thought provoking volume will be of interest to students and researchers working in legal and political theory and philosophy.

Most significant problems of contemporary life have their origins in nihilism and its paradoxical logic, which is simultaneously destructive to and constitutive of society. Yet, in social theory, nihilism is a surprisingly under-researched topic. This book develops a systematic account of nihilism in its four main forms: escapism, radical nihilism, passive nihilism and 'perfect nihilism.' It focuses especially on the disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism (the negation of the will) and radical nihilism (the will to negation), between the hedonism/disorientation that characterizes the contemporary post-political culture and the emerging forms of despair and violence as a reaction to it. The book deals with nihilism at three levels. First, it addresses the genealogy and consequences of nihilism, which is followed by an excursus through film analysis. Then the book focuses on the 'social,' relating nihilism to capitalism, post-politics and terrorism. Another excursus fleshes out the theoretical argumens by focusing on Houellebecq's fiction. Finally, the possibilities of overcoming nihilism are considered by emphasizing the significance of concepts such as event, agonism and antagonism in this context.