Producing solidarity : a settlement strategy of the Karen refugee community in Brisbane, Australia

This paper explores the link between experience and context. It places the lived experiences of Karen refugees during settlement in Brisbane, Australia within the socio-political context of Burma, or particularly the historical context of persecution. Two key events – the Wrist-tying Ceremony and the Karen New Year – provide a link between experience and context. The findings of this study show a community strategically at work in a new and ongoing settlement process. This process pays respect to the complexities of cultural integrity whilst also engaging with the challenges of integration. The complexities are local (in terms of cultural, linguistic and religious diversity), national (maintaining a broader sense of community that includes linkages across Australia, as well as an engagement with the Australian socio-political context), and transnational (participating in a global Karen community). This transnational community encompasses Karen settling elsewhere in the world, Karen in refugee camps neighbouring Burma, and Karen living inside Burma. This paper argues that substantial “identity work” is involved in Karen settlement. The two key community events are useful vignettes of this identity work. Both events demonstrate how Karen cultural practices can meaningfully negotiate deeply historical ideas of Karen identity with contemporary challenges of settlement. In addition, they set out a version of settlement that departs from traditional settlement constructs; they show how the lived experience of settlement is messy, complex and dynamic, and not reflective of the neat, idealistic models that immigration policy and settlement theory project.

Spaces for Solidarity and Individualism in Educational Contexts

Foreword For children and youth, as citizens in a society, being a part of educational systems means being involved in a community. Through participation in educational systems, there is important learning about the self and others, both for individual development and social solidarity. Individual development and social solidarity are interrelated. These are important values in education at all levels. Individuals are social beings and are necessarily interdependent on others. Nevertheless, individualism and social solidarity are values that sometimes can diverge and come into conflict. These values can be defined and interpreted in various ways. In a time of neo-liberalism, for example, where individual choices and rights are put at the forefront of the societal and educational discourses in many countries it is relevant to raise questions on how issues of solidarity and individualism are interpreted and negotiated in education. What kind of shape and definitions do these concepts take when schools and preschools live under the intense pressures for the accountability of educational outcomes(Biesta, 2009)? Under what conditions can values, such as solidarity and individualism, co-exist and develop in multicultural and globalized societies, without one dominating the other...

Challenging Educational Underdevelopment: The Cuban Solidarity Approach as a Mode of South-South Cooperation

The Capacity to Share is the first book to document how Cubans share their highly developed educational services with other low-income states, especially those in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A variety of international and Cuban authors break new ground in presenting this research. They investigate the experiences of people who have studied in Cuba on scholarships from the Cuban government, the implications for their home countries, and the work of Cuban teachers and administrators to support education in other countries. The authors discuss how the Cuban "solidarity" approach prioritizes global educational cooperation for mutual support, rather than imposing conditional aid. The book offers original and unusual insights into issues of culture, education, aid, development, and change as they relate to low-income states.

Consciousness, solidarity and hope as prevention and rehabilitation

This paper grapples with the question of how progressive criminologists might approach working with people who have committed violent or predatory crimes, or are ‘at risk’ of doing so. Progressives have often been uneasy about ‘intervention’ with people who offend: but in the face of the destructiveness of violence, especially in some parts of the world, a posture of simple non-intervention won’t suffice. I suggest three central principles – which I call consciousness, solidarity and hope – that may guide us in developing ways of working with offenders that are both progressive and effective.

Workers are doing it for themselves? Local labor solidarity in precarious times

Historically, organized labor has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing basic rights and privileges for screen media workers and defending union and guild members (however unevenly) from egregious abuses of power. Yet, despite the recent turn to labor in media and cultural studies, organized labor today has received only scant attention, even less so in locations outside Hollywood. This presentation thus intervenes in two significant ways: first, it acknowledges the ongoing global ‘undoing’ of organized labor as a consequence of footloose production and conglomeration within the screen industries, and second, it examines a case example of worker solidarity and political praxis taking shape outside formal labor institutions in response to those structural shifts. Accordingly, it links an empirical study of individual agency to broader debates associated with the spatial dynamics of screen media production, including local capacity, regional competition, and precariousness. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with local film and television workers in Glasgow, Scotland, I consider the political alliance among three nascent labor organizations in the city: one for below-the-line crew, one for facility operators, and (oddly enough) one for producers. Collectively, the groups share a desire to transform Glasgow into a global production hub, following the infrastructure developments in nearby cities like Belfast, Prague, and Budapest. They furthermore frame their objectives in political terms: establishing global scale is considered a necessary maneuver to improve local working conditions like workplace safety, income disparity, skills training, and job access. Ultimately, I argue these groups are a product of an inadequate union structure and outdated policy vision for the screen sector , once-supportive institutions currently out of sync with the global realities of media production. Furthermore, the groups’ advocacy efforts reveal the extent to which workers themselves (in additional to capital) can seek “spatial fixes” to suture their prospects to specific political and economic goals. Of course, such activities manifest under conditions outside of the workers’ control but nevertheless point to an important tension within capitalist social relations, namely that the agency to reshape the spatial relationships in their own lives recasts the geography of labor in terms that aren’t inherent or exclusive to the interests of global capital.

Qualifying Cosmopolitanism? Solidarity, Criticism, and Michael Walzer's 'View from the Cave'

Erskine, Toni, 'Qualifying Cosmopolitanism? Solidarity, Criticism, and Michael Walzer's 'View from the Cave'', International Politics (2007) 44(1) pp.125-149 RAE2008

The training in social and solidarity economy. Analysis of the university offer in Spain

This research analyses the importance of the training for the promotion of the social economy in two ways: 1) focusing on the characteristics of the educational offer of Social Economy and 2) analyzing its differences regarding to those studies from the Management, entrepreneurship, and innovations areas. To this aim, it is carried out as a first step a literature review of the contributions that study the relationships that can exist between the education and Economy. Then, being based on this previous analysis, we already center our research on the Social Economy sector and its relations with the education system. To get this objective, it has been developed a database that includes all the postgraduate titles related to the Economics area. Likewise, a questionnaire has been designed with the aim of characterize the training in social Economy. As a conclusion, it is obtained that the training in social economy in postgraduate studies in the Spanish Universities is very poor. On the other hand, there are significant differences between Social Economy degrees and Business Management, entrepreneurship and innovation degrees with regard to different aspects such as: values to transmit, competencies, skills, the way of understanding the Economy, etc. Based on these conclusions, different recommendations are proposed in order to promote and boost this other way of doing Economy through the training and education in postgraduate studies.

Europe’s Information Society project and Digital Inclusion: universal service obligations or social solidarity?

The importance of digital inclusion to Europe is obvious: as we move towards an ever more internet-communicating society the lack of access to basic digital infrastructures for a significant segment of the population is both problematic for those individuals without access and also problematic for those providing services which should be efficient and fully utilised. The EU’s ‘Information Society’ project has been the central plank of the European attempt to build a European digital marketplace, a concept which necessitates digital inclusion of the population at large. It is a project which prefers universal service obligations to achieve inclusion. If that is to be the preferred solution I suggest that we must consider exclusion from the banking system, given that the Information Society is at root an economic community.

However, universal service obligations are not the only method whereby digital inclusion can be encouraged and I posit we may need to reconsider the role of the state as supplier of services through the concept of ‘social solidarity’.

‘Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt’: Solidarity between generations in the Irish crisis

Ireland has gained a reputation for peaceable acceptance of austerity following a European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout in 2010. While proponents of austerity praise Ireland’s stoicism, critics of global capitalism argue that individuals and families are paying for mistakes made by elites. However, little is known about the strategies people adopt to cope with cutbacks to welfare entitlements. Drawing on a study of solidarity between generations living in Ireland in 2011–12, this article explores the lived experience of economic crisis and austerity. One hundred interviews with people of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds are analysed using constructivist grounded theory. Data show how austerity impacts differentially according to socio-economic status. While solidarity between generations leads to re-distribution of resources within families, providing some security for people with access to family resources, it reinforces inequality at societal level. We conclude that reliance on family promotes ‘coping’ rather than ‘protesting’ responses to austerity.

Family, state, class and solidarity: re-conceptualising intergenerational solidarity through the grounded theory approach

The relationship between class and intergenerational solidarities in the public and private spheres calls for further conceptual and theoretical development. This article discusses the findings from the first wave of a qualitative longitudinal study entitled Changing Generations, conducted in Ireland in 2011–2012, comprising 100 in-depth interviews with men and women across the age and socioeconomic spectrums. Constructivist grounded theory analysis of the data gives rise to the following postulates: (1) intergenerational solidarity at the family level is strongly contoured by socioeconomic status (SES); (2) intergenerational solidarity evolves as family generations observe each others’ practices and adjust their expectations accordingly; (3) intergenerational solidarity within families is also shaped by the public sphere (the welfare state) that generates varying expectations and levels of solidarity regarding State supports for different age groups, again largely dependent on SES; (4) the liberal welfare state context, especially at a time of economic crisis, enhances the significance of intergenerational solidarity within families. We conclude by calling for research that is attuned to age/generation, gender and class, and how these operate across the family and societal levels.