Opposition Politics

For much of the second half of 20th century, student political activism occupied a special place in the history of many countries and Singapore is no exception. Driven by their youthful energy, idealism and romanticism before they were tied down by the heavy burdens of family, career and property ownership, students of Singapore had also once surged to the forefront of national politics, exerted an influence out of proportion to their numbers and become a force to be reckoned with. Although student politics is an important part of the history of Singapore, the understanding of this topic has been much shackled and its positioning ambiguous. Under the influence of the Cold War rhetoric and with an eagerness to inscribe a victor’s version of events, the ruling People’s Action Party has scripted a national history which simplified the student community into the polarized binary of those who received education under the Chinese medium of instruction and those who learnt in English. The rigidity of this official articulation has led to the tendency of apportioning much greater attention to student activism associated with the former group, while sidelining parallel developments in the latter and largely ignoring the inter-connectivity between these two groups. It has also framed Chinese educated activists as being the natural agents of Communism. In recent years, this official paradigm has come under contestation by historical political memories, reinterpretation of sources, and emergence of alternative representations through popular culture. This revisionism exposes the disjuncture between the party’s current attempt to entice present-day students out of their deeply-seated political apathy and its omission to reconsider the nature and contribution of past student politics. It also opens up unprecedented space for reflections about civic culture and political maturity in Singapore today.

This article describes the concepts and approaches to Cultural Opposition used by the COURAGE project (funded by the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 programme). It examines how can the legacy of Cultural Opposition be analyzed from the perspective of the cultural heritage and collections and what are the promises of the Cultural Opposition term for the emergence of new possibilities in the historiography of the Communist Era. This article argues that the use of cultural heritage of the socialist Cultural Opposition is strongly linked to the history and trajectory of the Cultural Opposition collections, and that the analysis of the collections story offers a clearer understanding of the post-communist transformation from a different point of view.

In this article, I examine early religious literature in the Albanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in combination with ecclesiastical rivalries and a differential opposition to Ottoman rule, must have promoted an inherent cultural process of differentiation, especially between Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians. In particular, I argue that the contradicting motivations of language politics, political contradistinction, Enlightenment propagation, Orthodox evangelism, ecclesiastical confrontation, and missionary counteraction lead inadvertently to a boundary work of the social reorganization of linguistic and cultural difference.

This Working Paper series presents papers in a preliminary form and serves to stimulate comment and discussion. The views expressed are entirely the author's own and not that of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies ... ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to ...

There is growing recognition that radical ontological difference underlies Indigenous communities’ opposition to extractivist development within their territories. Scholars writing from a political ontology (PO) framework excitedly posit the possibility of the pluriverse emerging from the ‘ontological openings’ (de la Cadena 2015a) that these struggles are forming in the project of modernity. While such accounts are useful in elucidating how such struggles are more than ‘mere resource conflicts’ (Coombes et al. 2012a), they also risk reifying ontological difference and losing sight of the power asymmetries which shape its pragmatic and strategic articulation. More than just a matter of academic debate, overstating the ontological difference of Indigenous opposition to extractivism is a ‘cosmopolitical risk’ (Cepek 2016) that has the potential to limit Indigenous communities’ particular aspirations for self-determination. As a consequence, this article suggests a way forward can be f...

This book examines the political and developmental thought of the democratic socialist opposition party of India during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. It thereby contributes to a modern global history of political ideas and examines the role of Marxism, Gandhi and modernisation theory for the political development of India during the Cold War. The study focuses on the modernisation policies implemented by the Nehru government: Increasingly facing competing claims from Nehru to be pursuing socialist policies after the mid-1950s, the movement eventually broke apart and large numbers of socialists were assimilated by the Congress Party where they continued to shape Indian politics.

... In these circumstances it is important to mention that 'Ali has a girlfriend, Maryam, a woman of his age whom he met in college and whom he is now seeing ... 192 David Thurfjell introduced by the West as a part of a cultural invasion (tahajom-e farhangi) directed toward Muslims. ...

Content nonconceptualism (CNC, henceforth) and State conceptualism (SNC, henceforth) are motivated by constraints of content-attribution that pull in opposite directions, namely, the so-called cognitive significance requirement (CSR, henceforth) and what I would like to call here the same representing constraint (SRR, henceforth). The solution to this apparent contradiction is the rejection of the real content view (RV, henceforth) and the adherence to what I call here Content-pragmatism (CPR, henceforth). In CPR, "proposition" is not as real as a mental state, but rather is a term of art that semanticists use, as a matter of theoretical convenience, to classify mental states. What follows from CPR is Content-pluralism (CP, henceforth): there is no such a thing as the content of experience. Because both criticisms and the defense of SNC overlook CPR and CP, they are ineffective. In this paper, I will argue that the opposition between SNC and CNC is a real one, but only a r...

This paper proposes solutions for a number of difficulties that Swalean generic structure analysis has been experiencing concerning the identification methods it applies to generic structure components. It does this by integrating the Greimassian method, a structuralist method of reducing elements to the minimal units of signification. In making this proposal, it points out that the underlying goal of Swalean genre analysis, which aims to classify various academic elements that differ in their degree of prototypicality into an umbrella of family resemblance, can be considered analogous to the structuralist goal of reducing elements to the minimal units despite the different theoretical groundings of these two approaches. It demonstrates the compatibility of these approaches by reducing some of the components of the Creating A Research Space (CARS) model; namely, it reduces Move 1 and Move 2 into one unit. Additional emerging elements that are similarly complex in academic writing, s...

The article presents the results of a round table devoted to the analysis of factors that provoke the distortion of reality in the media news, we show the ambivalence of assessments and the difference in defining the essence of news and news journalism. The authors of the discussion identify the role of technological, economic, political and ideological factors that influence the distortion of reality in the news, consider the causes of “fakes” in news reports, their beneficiaries and the bonuses received, and also make an attempt to identify shortcomings in the legal framework in the area of responsibility of communicators for the unreliability of news messages. During the discussion, the news texts of both the opposition press and the media of a loyalist bias were analysed from the standpoint of assessing and interpreting political events, meaningful and axiological priorities; the specifics of the formation and presentation of news from the point of view of reality distortion tec...

My gratitude goes first to my family without whom, I would not be in such position or reached this stage in my life. Thanks to my mother who taught me how to be an independent and responsible woman who always seek to do the best she can. Thanks to my father who has been a role model for a hard-worker, dedicated and cooperative professor to his students and who always encouraged me to work and improve myself. Thanks as well to my teachers at school and my professors at university whether in the bachelor degree or the master’s degree who contributed to my personality and my knowledge by their continuous help and advice. However, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Kevin Koehler who was a role model for a dedicated and cooperative professor to his students. Thanks for your patience throughout the way and for your continuous support and guidance which added a lot to my mentality and research capabilities. I would also like to give special thanks to Dr. Oliver Schlumb...

Martin Heidegger’s Dialogie on Language between himself and a Japanese who visited him at his home in Freiburg in March 1954 is the best known but not a singular event of this kind in the last century, either in respect to the topic (the opposition between the East and the West) or setting. The three cases we are referring to in this paper are all communications of the Platonic kind, that is, sites of debate on cultural differences. Generally perceived as statements in the unsurpassable distinctions of mental make-up mapped onto geographical frontiers, these European-Japanese encounters seem, at a closer look, to convey quite the opposite meaning encrypted, however, at a deeper, subconscious level of a false consciousenss nourished by fashionable ideas of the moment.

ABSTRACT Reid opposes an indirect, representational view of the mind. He criticizes its following basic assumptions the substantive nature of the mind, the causal theory of perception, and the indirect nature of perception. The article also explores Reid's alternative view.

The purpose of this narrative study is to understand the experience of a transgender woman through the process of self-discovery in contrast to a society often in opposition to transness in a rural town in the Rocky Mountain region. The findings of this study illustrate the perseverance of gender identity despite personal and cultural obstacles. The results provide further evidence of gender identity as personal, persistent, developing, and undeniable. The alternative writing of this story is designed to capture the unique story of a young woman whose trans community has been overlooked by traditional research writing.