Resistance

Question 1

How is domination linked to resistance?

Answer 1

Power is authority
Domination is the outcome of social relations of power
Resistance is the opposite to domination

Question 2

What forms of resistance exist?

Answer 2

Civil wars, uprisings, inner city riots, anti-colonial struggles
Sit-ins, walk-outs, protest marches
Mundane, banal, everyday
Individual or collective
Overt or hidden
Violent or non-violent
Progressive (e.g. Occupy movements; Pussy Riot) or Reactionary (Tea Party in the US) i.e. resistance can be used to bring about social change or to prevent change and secure a dominant order.

Question 3

What does resistance in cultural products look like?

Answer 3

Music/Sound – Sex Pistols (Anarchy in the UK); Public Enemy (Fight the Power); Fela Kuti (Demo crazy)
Visual/Graffitti (Jean-Michel Basquiat; Banksy)
Blogs, poetry, films and novels
Concept of resistance can itself be commodified, as in computer games

Question 4

Explain the structuralist approach to resistance.

Answer 4

Marxism/neo-Marxism
Feminism

Resistance = opposition to domination by:
State
Capital - e.g. working class struggles/ revolutions
Patriarchy e.g. feminist movements

Question 5

Explain the culturalist approach to resistance.

Answer 5

The economic and the cultural as dependent on one another. Forms of struggle in the realm of culture are just as important

Influenced by Gramscian ideas of domination through consent/common sense; hegemony exercised by the bourgeoisie through civil society

Resistance possible through counter-hegemonic ideas that challenge the common sense understandings of the dominant.

Question 6

Explain the post-structuralist approach to resistance.

Answer 6

Foucault sees power as diffused, decentred; power is productive and enabling, as well as repressive and constraining.

Power is multidimensional – pluralistic (social power, political power)

‘Power is both positive and negative, regressive and progressive and constraining and facilitative’( Sharp et al 2000:2)

Question 7

Resistance at the Global scale

Answer 7

‘The local and the global are not natural scales, but formed precisely out of the struggles that they seemingly only contain’ (Pile 1997: 13).
Effective resistance can come about only as the result of thinking global and acting local

e.g. Occupy movements. (Smith 2011)
Resistance against global class domination through local place-based activism;
Shift from blaming territories – wealthy nation to a focus on the 1% a global capitalist class (Spark 2013).

Question 8

Resistance at Local scale

Answer 8

Coping strategies
Gossiping, smoking
Time wasting; foot-dragging
Consuming/Not consuming particular products
Using space in unintended ways; loitering
Boiling seeds before planting (anti-colonial)

Question 9

What is Radical geography?

Answer 9

Responding to 1960s civil rights, anti-war and feminist movements, etc.
Radical geography - approaches to geography committed to overturning relations of power and oppression, and to constructing more socially just, egalitarian and liberating geographies and ways of living.

Question 10

What is Marxist geography?

Answer 10

Examines uneven socio-spatial relations between capital, labour and commodities
Focuses on socio-spatial relations of class: how spatial practices produce and reproduce social inequality at different scales

Resistance is adapting a class position in opposition to the hidden injuries of capitalist social relations (Pile & Keith 1997).

Question 11

Post-structuralist geographies of resistance?

Answer 11

Sharp et al (2000:1) see ‘domination/resistance’ as a ‘couplet’.

Grounded in Foucauldian understanding of power

They write of ‘the myriad entanglements that are integral to the workings of power – countless processes of domination and resistance which are always implicated in, and mutually constitutive of, one another’.

They emphasise ‘the deep spatiality of the spinning together of domination and resistance within power’ (2001: 1)

Question 12

Resistance and Relational Politics?

Answer 12

Focuses on the diverse forms of identity and agency constituted through subaltern political activity
Rethinks resistance to dominant forms of globalization by emphasizing the translocal, often transnational, character of subaltern protest.
A different understanding of the relationship between space, place and resistance: resistance is never purely local and place bound. It is also networked and transnational.
Draws on actor network theory to develop a relational approach to resistance and the political