resistance Archives

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices

Despite many decades of research into childhood resilience, it remains a contentious area with much still left to be resolved. Key terms are poorly defined, positioning marginalised and displaced children as objects rather than co-producers of knowledge. Research and practice frame resilience through individualised models of health and abnormality. These models emphasise individual responsibility over systemic oppression, ignoring personal marginalised voices and experiences, and the contribution of appropriate needs-based assistance. Resilience needs rethinking.

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices uses an interdisciplinary approach to challenge current childhood resilience research and practice. The culmination of ten years of research and publications around childhood resilience, the book draws upon data collected from and co-produced with children, young people and adults from marginalised, disadvantaged and displaced communities. In so doing, it highlights the transformative potential of stories told by marginalised and displaced children, past and present. When these narratives are prioritised, they disrupt, counter and draw critical attention to coping strategies in light of adversity and oppression, to inform creative research and policymaking. Centralising the voices of care leavers, young people who are bullied, members from minority ethnic communities and former migrants/refugees, among others, Wendy Sims-Schouten shines a light on 150 years of marginalised voices and experiences in relation to resilience.

Praise for Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices

‘This thought-provoking book revisits the concept of resilience through close interpretation of the moving stories told by marginalised children and adults across time, shining new light on the rebellious, resistant ones, so often dismissed as ‘dangerous’ or ‘deviant’. A must-read!’
Helen Cowie, University of Surrey

‘Listening to the stories of marginalised people empowers their voices and gives a very rich, multifaceted and critically innovative perspective which can reshape how we understand oppression and exclusion. Especially, this liberating book shows how conventional discussions of individual resilience can obscure the social and cultural processes we need to understand.’
Helen Haste, University of Bath

‘Adopting an intriguing and eclectic perspective of resilience in understudied samples, this is a rare book that challenges the status quo. A must read for anyone seeking to gain unique insight into the concept of resilience.’
Nora Wiium, University of Bergen

Plantation Crisis

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy.

Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India’s tea belt.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil

Rather than looking back into Brazil’s authoritarian past, the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022) provides an innovative case study through which to explore Brazil’s manifold and recurring expressions of authoritarianism. This book investigates the ways that authoritarianism most recently emerged and how it was confronted, and, in doing so, the varied ways (and spaces) in which struggles over the meaning and practice of democracy that took place during the period.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil examines repression and dissent: efforts to dismantle democratic foundations alongside forms of contestation and resistance to authoritarianism. The chapters offer valuable theoretical and ethnographic insights, from interdisciplinary perspectives, into the complex realities that Brazilians experienced in the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The book is organised around four sections, each addressing a core area where democracy, as meaning and practice, was contested, attacked and defended. This is shown not only between Bolsonaro’s government and those who resisted it from within and outside the state, but also between state and non-state actors and between public and private sectors, allowing for a broad view of the country’s polarised political landscape and the impact such struggles have had on civil society.

Praise for The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil

‘An extraordinary analysis of how Brazil’s far right built cultural hegemony before seizing institutional power. It unpacks both the circumstances and the structures behind this rise – and, crucially, shows that the battle is far from over. A vital lens on contemporary global politics.’
Gabriel Feltran, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po, Paris.

‘Bringing together diverse interdisciplinary perspectives, this book offers a timely exploration of Brazil’s recent political experiences with authoritarianism and resistance, making it essential reading for those concerned with democracy’s future – in Brazil and beyond.’ Malu. A. C. Gatto, UCL

‘A timely contribution that explores not only the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in Brazil, but different forms of resistance that have emerged from efforts to push back. This is an important book that paints a sobering picture of how democracy is under threat in contemporary Brazil.’
Dr Jeff Garmany, University of Melbourne

Writing Resistance

In 1884, the first of 68 prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum security prison at Shlissel´burg Fortress near St Petersburg. The regime of indeterminate sentences in isolation caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, over half of whom died. But the survivors fought back to reform the prison and improve the inmates’ living conditions. The memoirs many survivors wrote enshrined their story in revolutionary mythology, and acted as an indictment of the Tsarist autocracy’s loss of moral authority.

Writing Resistance features three of these memoirs, all translated into English for the first time. They show the process of transforming the regime as a collaborative endeavour that resulted in flourishing allotments, workshops and intellectual culture – and in the inmates running many of the prison’s everyday functions. Sarah J. Young’s introductory essay analyses the Shlissel´burg memoirs’ construction of a collective narrative of resilience, resistance and renewal. It uses distant reading techniques to explore the communal values they inscribe, their adoption of a powerful group identity, and emphasis on overcoming the physical and psychological barriers of the prison.

The first extended study of Shlissel´burg’s revolutionary inmates in English, Writing Resistance uncovers an episode in the history of political imprisonment that bears comparison with the inmates of Robben Island in South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Maze Prison in Belfast during the Troubles. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the Russian revolution, carceral history, penal practice and behaviours, and prison and life writing.

Praise for Writing Resistance

‘The memoirs published by Young have not been republished in Russian since the 1920s, becoming a bibliographic rarity [and] the presentation of which to an English-speaking audience is an undoubted breakthrough in studying the history of the prisoners of the Shlisselburg Fortress.’
Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique

‘Convey[s] a sense of squandered human potential.’
The Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

‘An impressive study … Young’s expertise in Russian literature and language is reflected in her skilful translations capturing the many nuances, registers and special meanings of words used by the inmates. Like all history books that offer important and original translations of sources with a handy glossary and meticulous bibliography, this publication would be a welcome reference in any library. However, Young has produced a book for anyone interested in narratives about resistance, resilience and renewal.’
European History Quarterly

‘Young has made a great contribution to prison literature with her translations, and her work would be of interest to academicians, researchers and students who are interested in carceral life of political prisoners during the Soviet Union.’
International Journal of Russian Studies

‘Sarah Young has performed an exceptional service to the field of nineteenth-century studies by assembling this superb edition of three representative memoirs written by revolutionaries held in the Shlissel’burg prison under the Russian Empire’s last two tsars, Aleksandr III and Nikolai II….Writing Resistance is an exceptional collection that will interest anyone who works on radical movements, prison reform and carceral issues, or even women’s history in the nineteenth century. The collection raises important issues about the degree of continuity between nineteenth-century Russian carceral practices and the operations of the Soviet political confinement system.’
Nineteenth-Century Contexts

‘Sarah J. Young’s excellent collection of revolutionary memoirs from Shlissel’burg Prison provides a welcome addition to a range of scholarly fields, from history to carceral studies, translation and literature.’
Revolutionary Russia

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The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil

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