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3 Foundations of Europe’s collective household There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’. (Benjamin, 1992: 248) Of the many dream-houses of the world’s civilizations the Pantheon in Rome is possibly the most beautiful: a perfectly proportioned hemisphere within a cylinder, an apotheosis of architecture expressing the harmonization of religious and civic ideals. Hadrian had this beautiful house erected, though he had it accredited to an earlier consul, Agrippa, because Hadrian’s accession to power after the
This book explores the issue of a collective representation of Ireland after the sudden death of the 'Celtic Tiger' and introduces the aesthetic idea that runs throughout. The focus is on the idea articulated by W. B. Yeats in his famous poem 'The Second Coming'. The book also explores the symbolic order and imaginative structure, the meanings and values associated with house and home, the haunted houses of Ireland's 'ghost estates' and the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household. It examines the sophisticated financial instruments derived from mortgage-backed securities that were a lynchpin of global financialization and the epicentre of the crash, the question of the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household of Europe. A story about fundamental values and principles of fairness and justice is discussed, in particular, the contemporary conflict that reiterates the ancient Irish mythic story of the Tain. The book suggests correspondences between Plato's Republic and the Irish republic in the deformations and devolution of democracy into tyranny. It traces a red thread from the predicament of the ancient Athenians to contemporary Ireland in terms of the need to govern pleonexia, appetites without limits. The political and economic policies and practices of Irish development, the designation of Ireland's 'tax free zones', are also discussed. Finally, the ideal type of person who has been emerging under the auspices of the neoliberal revolution is imagined.
chapter we will see that some of these kinds of households are emblematic of specific cities, the Brighton queer bedsit being one of them. In Leeds there are rich histories of collective households, many of them women only, while in Manchester and Plymouth, LGBTQ people negotiated the rights to social housing that were previously reserved for heterosexual families. Local politics and queer cultures, as well as city-specific housing markets, have influenced how people made queer homes. The second half of the chapter looks
Utopia is an ideal society in an imaginary country. 'Utopia' in Greek means 'No place', and utopias are frustratingly to be found on faraway islands, continents or planets which are difficult to reach. Philosophers and writers have followed the prophets and been quick to offer their own versions of utopia. While anarchism has always had a utopian dimension in the sense of imagining a free society without the state, not all literary utopias have been anarchistic. Anarchist utopias value mutual aid and solidarity as well as personal freedom and autonomy. The anarchist utopia is not the closed space of a perfect society but engages in constant struggle against protean forms of domination, hierarchy and exploitation. Wary of the many potential pitfalls of utopian speculation and, in particular, of the ways in which it may constrain free thinking rather than enrich it, many anarchists are now united far more by what they are against than what they are for. The primary aim of this book is to encourage further reflection on the wisdom of such blanket anarchist anti-utopianism. It does so by assembling the first collection of original essays to explore the relationship between anarchism and utopianism and, in particular, the ways in which their long historical interaction from the Warring States epoch of ancient China to the present day has proven fruitful for emancipatory politics.
political life. She thought, ‘what, am I supposed to give up my bourgeois solutions and have collective households?’ Mica felt torn between Sheli’s ideas and her own instincts about how to reconcile middle-class mothering with the new socialism. She felt Sheli’s comments acutely because of how strongly she admired her as a professional woman and radical. Within the narrative of each Tufnell Park and Belsize Lane interviewee was the trope of the divided female and activist self. The mystifying conflicts young activist women had felt whilst trying to negotiate contradictory
departed, with their household gods broken and thrown down, represents cultural trauma and tragedy; the destruction of the collective household of Irish society. Religious icons, furniture and décor, family memorabilia and household bric a brac, elements from real and imagined scenes, appear as images from dreams – the dreams which these houses’ former residents had assembled around themselves, as well as the dream images and memories of home that we ourselves project into these scenes. They are ‘phantasmagorias of the interior’, shifting scenes of real and imagined
stories of ‘non-aligned’ activism as it developed over the course of the 1970s and 1980s; men’s and women’s political experiences and relations in local community campaigns; Women’s Liberation childcare projects, tenants’ disputes, trade union and council struggles and private relations inside collective households. Efforts to understand the impact of Women’s Liberation as a new female political authority call for historians to read male and female experiences of public activism and private life against each other. Chapter 5 revealed the crisis in masculine left
others, moving seamlessly from school to this collective household of young and poor urban single women. When we gather in the evenings in front of the TV, she sometimes speaks to me again about her school years. You were out having fun, having a good time. I didn’t feel like I was devalued [ naqsa ]. I was just like everybody
context portrayed. Notably, the woodcut illustration appears to place clear emphasis on a particular set of sensory experiences that articulate the domestic intimacy of a family gathered around a psalm book or books. Through the senses of touch and sight, domestic psalm singing is represented in the image as private familial interaction, and these sensory exchanges are perhaps even more significant to the participants than musical performance itself. The family members communicate with one another in this collective household activity through physical contact, and
’s live broadcast saw over 2,500 weekend passes being purchased and many more views as again collective household viewing came into play. Both festivals reported that these digital iterations democratised access and inclusion to their festivals: because of their rural locations, international audiences that could not travel or are unlikely to attend every year could experience the festival remotely for