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This article looks to psychoanalytic theory to underscore how actions of collective refusal can disrupt systems of racial injustice. Specifically, I focus on the recent uprising in West Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, a black man killed while in police custody. I elaborate on Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of 'creative maladjustment' to reject the media's depiction of the Baltimore uprising as indicative of pathology within the community and instead theorize the event as conducive to ethical and social change. Through King's notion of 'creative maladjustment' and a Lacanian notion of ethics, I contend that Baltimore dissidents have challenged the normalcy of structural racism, initiating a transformation in America's approach to race-based dispossession, state violence, and mass incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the geography of urban uprising during the so-called Arab Spring, with a focus on the relationship between its virtual and physical dimensions. To enhance understanding of contemporary social movements, it pays particular attention to the interwoven relationship between the social media that now organise gatherings and communicate political messages, the practices of protest in urban space and the magnifying power of global and national media. Using case studies from Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, it analyses the spatial and temporal aspects of recent protests and suggests that the reciprocal interaction between social media, urban space and traditional media does not simply reproduce relations between these actors, but also transforms them incrementally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summer 2013 was a historic period in regards to political activism in Turkey. Commonly referred to as ‘the Gezi Resistance’, the grass-roots mobilisation caught the rather self-assured AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) government off guard as hundreds of thousands rushed to the streets, squares and parks to reclaim those spaces publicly. The resistance started with the attempt by a handful of environmentalists to protect a few trees being cut down in central Istanbul. Then it quickly moved beyond just about protecting a few trees and became a collective reaction to the recent and ongoing urban modelling projects that would turn commons into gated spaces for consumption. Significantly, the Gezi Resistance, which reclaimed public spaces, started to mobilise multiple identity groups who entered into the political arena in the radical democratic sense. This paper aims to scrutinise Gezi Resistance and the occupation of the park in relation to reclaiming public spaces and the politics of identity, hence as an opportunity for a radical democratic emancipation. In this context, emancipation refers to contestation against the dominating discourses of the majoritarian government with neoconservative tendencies. Public space is contextualised as the agonistic domain that enables individuals both to appear, hence become visible for a possible interaction and acknowledgement, and join collaborative struggles against dominant discourses. In this regard, performing dissent re-produces subjectivities while articulating these to one another also requires a public space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]