Recent scholarship has come to rethink how the concept of anarchy captures the fragmented plurality of contemporary world politics. This article continues that inquiry through an interpretative reading of the popular TV-series Game of Thrones. The appeal of this show partly derives from its animation of medieval tropes to interpellate with contemporary global politics; it echoes power struggles constitutive of today's international relations. However, while the fantasy show portrays conflictual relations between different claimants of the Iron Throne in Westeros, it also composes subaltern voices amidst these violent claims to power. This article concludes that such an interpretation diversifies the meanings of anarchy, as both violence and freedom, in the 'game of thrones' of contemporary politics.

This article traces divergent approaches to democracy in the history of anarchist thought. It outlines an anarchist critique of democracy, a defiant composition arrayed against authority, representation and majority rule. Put in contrast to that approach is the anarchist reclamation, the understanding of anarchy as democracy radicalized. The article shows how the critique of democracy typifies classical anarchist thought, while reclamation of democracy breeds in post-classical anarchism after 1939. Yet these lines of thought also coexist historically, and they both continue into our days. Anarchism is now depicted in terms of radical democracy, while a reclaimed critique once again dissociates anarchy from democracy. In an attempt to recognize dialogue between them, this article suggests that divergent approaches articulate an impossible argument that could further the route toward anarchy.

This paper discusses variegated scholarly approaches to what is here typified as a political economy of meat. Identified as a multifaceted, transdisciplinary and most dynamic field of research, inquiries into the political economy of meat imbricate key issues of social and economic development, across the human–animal divide. While some scholars interpret livestock production as “a pathway from poverty”, others observe deepened marginalization and exploitation. The argument raised in this paper is that concise engagement with multiple critical perspectives may facilitate further explorations into the social dynamics that characterize the political economy of meat.

The past decades’ substantial growth in globalized meat consumption continues to shape the international political economy of food and agriculture. This political economy of meat composes a site of contention; in Brazil, where livestock production is particularly thriving, large agri-food corporations are being challenged by alternative food networks. This article analyzes experiential and experimental accounts of such an actor—a collectivized pork cooperative tied to Brazil’s Landless Movement—which seeks to navigate the political economy of meat. The ethnographic case study documents these livestock farmers’ ambiguity towards complying with the capitalist commodification process, required by the intensifying meat market. Moreover, undertaking an intersectional approach, the article theorizes how animal-into-food commodification in turn depends on the speciesist logic, a normative human/non-human divide that endorses the meat commodity. Hence the article demonstrates how alternative food networks at once navigate confines of capitalist commodification and the speciesist logic that impels the political economy of meat.

This book addresses the conflictual nature of radical democracy. By analyzing democratic conflict in Husby, a marginalized Stockholm city district, it exposes democracy’s core division – between governors and governed – as theorized by Jacques Rancière. Tracing the genealogy of that critique, the book interrogates a historical tradition generically adverse to every form of governance, namely anarchism. By outlining the divergent and discontinuous relationship between democracy and anarchy – within the history of anarchist thought – the author adds to democratic theory ‘The Impossible Argument’: a compound anarchist critique of radical democracy.

This book advances a theoretical approach that recognizes social movements as contingent enterprises. It explores the endurance of social movements over time, by developing analytical tools to study how social movement heterogeneities are simultaneously acknowledged and articulated together, through collective narration and practices. With a unique empirical analysis of one particular narrative – the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement – this book portrays a narrative revisited and revised by movement participants, a story revived through enactment. This book addresses the increasing academic audience seeking to study, and theorize, the multi-colored phenomena of resistance and social movements.

This dissertation explores the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement: its historiographical prequel, its narrative components, its modifications, its enactment. The study derives from a non-essentialist understanding of the resistance agent, here construed as political subject – a collective of individuals, contingently unified in a specific political struggle, not necessarily representing a mutual material need, nor a common identity. From the premise of political subject contingency, this dissertation sets out to explore resistance continuity. The empirical case is Movimento do Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST – commonly narrated as one of the world’s most longstanding and successful social movements, continuously navigating Brazil’s uneven politico-economic topography. The research problem concerns how to understand resistance continuity, from the non-essentialist notion of political subject contingency.

My approach is to examine the animate story of Brazil’s Landless Movement. The MST historiography encompasses a prequel to that story. An empirical analysis of ethnographic sources and Jornal Sem Terra (MST’s internal newspaper) suggests that the scene of this prequel, alike the MST story, takes place at the social margins of the Brazilian nation-state project. Historiographical events and characters portray a specific historical context – five centuries of resistance – in which the MST story is situated. With the terminology of historian Reinhart Koselleck, MST’s historiography hereby produces a space of experience: specific understandings of the past that assign meaning to contemporary activities, fueling socio-political advocacies, then projected onto a collective horizon of expectation.

The contours of the MST story are not exclusively drawn by MST participants, but also, as implied by my meta-analysis of 275 MST-related scholarly texts, by academic storytelling. Ethnographic and meta-analytical inquiries thus verify the narrative’s stabilizing function for political subject formation. Yet the MST story is also notably flexible. A corpus analysis of Jornal Sem Terra reveals substantial narrative changes between 1981 and 2013. The antagonist of the MST story shifts from the traditional large landowner towards export-oriented agrifood corporations. This antagonist shift parallels an increased emphasis on the small-scale farmer, downplaying the original narrative protagonist: the landless rural worker. What remains constant is the narrative plot – agrarian social conflict – which then allows insertion of different characters into the storyline. Stability of the narrative plot enables flexibility of the story’s main characters.

Yet such narrative flexibility eventually reaches a point where it jeopardizes the narrative’s stability-producing function. This accentuates the activity aspect of political subject formation. My empirical analysis of 18 focus groups, 14 individual interviews, and ethnographic observations, demonstrates that the MST story is continuously enacted, through confrontative and constructive resistance activities, thus reviving the narrative plot of agrarian social conflict. Hence, the MST story is not only revisited by movement participants, reinforced through their personalized storytelling, revised for more precise applicability, but also revived when recurrently enacted. The making of resistance, through animate storytelling and narrative enactment, fosters continuity of a contingent political subject.

The argument raised in this article stems from the analytical distinction between summative and formative assessment. While summative assessment demarks a measurable fixation of the student’s knowledge level at a given point in time, formative assessment instead aims to propel the learning process. Formative assessment becomes particularly manifested in the educational moment of supervised essay writing. Continuous and flexible feedback is vital to the art of supervising. This practice of formative assessment is, in turn, key to the student’s possibilities for deep learning. A fruitful formula for formative assessment and deep learning is to establish a horizontal relationship between supervisor and student, what Olga Dysthe has called the partnership model. This partnership relation is, as argued in this article, endangered by the examination practice’s constant insertion of verticality into the student-teacher relationship. By limiting relational horizontality, the examination locks the pedagogical potential that is naturally embedded in the relational process of essay writing.