Race/Class/Gender

This article presents an analysis of how volunteers use different forms of capital to resist the practices and discourses of the organization for which they volunteer. Volunteers at a large public animal shelter do not share the shelter's institutionally held belief that shelter death is an inevitable result of homelessness among companion animals; to reduce shelter death, they craft challenges to the shelter practice of putting dogs down and work to construct shelter death as an avoidable and problematic outcome. Their repertoire of resistance includes educational, health-based, relational, moral, reputational, and legal strategies. The findings illuminate that volunteers' social location outside of the shelter provides them with capital to engage in resistance within the shelter.

Historic studies have demonstrated that individuals with visible tattoos can be perceived negatively and elicit expectations of criminality or dishonesty. Much research of this nature has not been experimental in design. A convenience sample of 80 people was recruited from Nottinghamshire, UK. Participants were given photographs depicting individuals with no tattoos, one arm tattooed and both arms tattooed, and asked to make a judgement about the guilt of the person pictured in relation to them potentially having committed a crime of either criminal damage, theft or assault. A questionnaire was administered to measure the stigma towards tattooed individuals following this. Ratings of the suspects with tattoos were significantly more negative in terms of criminality and guilt than the suspects with no tattoos, particularly in the case of the assault. The author discusses the impact this data could have on influencing on criminal justice practice.

Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis.

|| Pluto Press || ||  July 2019 || Paper ISBN: 9780745337784 || Cloth ISBN: 9780745337791 || 256 pages

The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses---from optimism for a left parliamentary politics, inspired by Syriza's electoral victory; to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU, and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty.

In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism.

As we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism, Surplus Citizens argues against the strategic fixation on unified identities, highlighting the transformative potential of internal conflict and the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it.

'In this original study, Kotouza powerfully shows how national social struggles, like the ones we witnessed in Greece in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, are littered with contradictions and exclusions. Nevertheless by taking the politics of the excluded as its horizon, Surplus Citizens offers us the hope of a more inclusive, transnational politics' - Elena Loizidou, Birkbeck University of London

'Breaking the ethno-national and state-centred cage into which discussions of the Greek crisis have largely been confined, Kotouza's book puts questions of race, gender and migration at the core of its analysis and provides us with a powerful model for investigating the dynamics and limits of contemporary surplus rebellions' - Alberto Toscano, author of 'Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea'

'An extraordinary achievement. Kotouza's incisive contribution to critical social theory and to the analysis of the contemporary dynamics of capitalist social relations should be read by all' - Werner Bonefeld, author of 'Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason'

'An extraordinary guide to our present' - Joshua Clover, author of 'Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings'

This paper is an exploration of the various strategies used by favela residents engaged in anti-eviction activism in Rio de Janeiro. In a broad sense, favela residents realise that they face eviction threats because of a marginalisation that manifests through gender, class, and race, albeit in different ways. The paper is structured in two parts: the first section addressed how gender has influenced anti-eviction activism. Here, I argue that women leaders in the movement feel they must justify their leadership positions and participation by engaging in what I call performative vulnerability. This performative vulnerability doubly serves to shame those that would wish to evict them but also helps make these women more intelligible as leaders within the social movement. The second section compared the impact of race and class in the movement through the lens of affective and emotional politics. I explained how residents interpret the common justifications for favela removal (i.e. environmental destruction, favelas as places without history) as being truly about classism and-to a lesser extent-racism. I reasoned that the general lack of awareness about the role of racism in favela evictions stems from the lingering ambivalence towards race and the false belief that Afro-descendants do not face discrimination.1