Counterfutures
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Victoria University of Wellington Library |
| ISSN | 2463-5340 / 2463-5359 |
| Wikidata | Q96703334 |
| OpenAlex | S4210227799 |
| Website | http://counterfutures.nz/online.html |
| Total publications | 80 |
| Coverage period | 2020 - 2026 |
| Country | NZ |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
| Impact factor | 0.139 |
"Counterfutures" is a journal focused on critical theory and radical politics. Critical theory is explicitly listed as a related area, making this a closely cognate venue that frequently publishes work read by social anthropologists
Art, Politics, and Modernism · Australian History and Society · Canadian Identity and History · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
A Punitive Turn
Issue 15 (2024) editorial by Sue Bradford, Jack Foster & Meteria Turei
Striking History
Cybèle LockeComrade: Bill Andersen—A Communist, Working-Class LifeWellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2022, 412pp It was with a mix of excitement and trepidation that I started reading Cybèle Locke’s Comrade soon after its publicationin late 2022. Excitement because Locke’s reputation as a rigorous historical researcher precedes her and this had been a long, heartfelt project on her part; trepidation because Bill Andersen had been a difficult cha…
Political Theology of Covid Governance
A popular view of contemporary New Zealand politics is that it is devoid of ‘religious’ dynamics, but the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic showed that religious ideals, cosmological paradigms, doctrinal discourses, and ritual practices continue to shape political processes. This article analyses themes of transcendence and the sacred in the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic, themes that became fundamental to the daily mana…
The Hokianga Dog Tax Uprising
Why was a seemingly mundane 19th-century fiscal measure—a tax levied on dog owners—met by Māori with widespread repudiation and an armed uprising? The significance of what is known as the ‘Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’ is often framed in terms of its apparent quashing by colonial forces in 1898, taken to signal the moment at which Crown sovereignty was finally imposed upon northern Māori. This paper questions the mainstream historical narrative, ta…
Adoptee Activism
In this article, we, three adoptee scholars, share collectively our experiences of adoption while engaging in activism that contests adoption practices. We apply autoethnographic and reflexive strategies to unpack our shared conversation in order to foreground the plight of adoptees and offer insight into adoption and the importance of the current law reform in Aotearoa New Zealand. We draw on a model of adoptee consciousness to frame the complex…
Futurism without a Future
An interview with the renowned Italian autonomist Marxist philosopher, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. The discussion charts Berardi’s entry into, and expulsion from, the Italian Communist Party in his teenage years and his introduction to the operaismo movement through Mario Tronti’s classic text Workers and Capital (1966). As one of the founders of the pirate station ‘Radio Alice’ and the avant-garde magazine A/traverso, Berardi was heavily involved in …
How Finance Colonised Aotearoa
This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, an…
Debt Abolition After the Crash
This article outlines the work programme for a national movement on indebtedness that recognises both a need for the abolition of current household debt and the recognition of socio-historical debt accrued to Indigenous, working-class, and other peoples as the result of racial capitalism. It finds capacities for the recognition of both forms of debt in qualities shared across Black radical abolitionism and the ‘New Reading’ of Marx. These qualiti…
The ‘Religious Right’ in the 2020 Aotearoa New Zealand General Election
This article investigates the unsettled relationship between religion and politics in Aotearoa New Zealand through a close study of the 2020 General Election. By examining three intersecting policy domains—health reform, Māori policy, and foreign affairs—the article examines the ways in which the New Conservatives, One Party, Vision New Zealand, and Advance New Zealand challenged normative paradigms of the ‘religious right’. While these groups’ m…
What is the Far-Right in Aotearoa New Zealand
Matthew Cunningham, Paul Spoonley, and Marinus La Rooij (eds.)Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New ZealandDunedin: Otago University Press, 2023, 444pp In 1988, Stuart Hall published The Hard Road to Renewal, a collection of essays written over the previous decade that attempted to grapple with the nature and significance of ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain. The Thatcherist neoliberal project, Hall argued, attempted to reconfigure the comm…
A Nation Still in Search of a New History
Bain Attwood ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2023, 320pp. Pākehā historian Ruth Ross is the hook for ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History. But this book is a genealogy of national proportions, charting the reception and reinterpretations of Treaty history by the Pākehā academy. In this regard, I would re…
Confronting Fascism
How did socialists in interwar Europe interpret fascism as it was evolving in the period? Taking a broad sociology of knowledge approach, this article examines the significant variety and complexity of socialist interpretations of fascism, but also the ways in which organisational interests, competitive intersocialist relations, and situational forces shaped and constrained these analyses. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which socialist defe…
Austerity, Precarity, and Tertiary Union Strategy
This intervention critiques the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) prior to, during, and beyond the 2023 ‘Stop the Cuts’ campaign across the tertiary education sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. The members of The Left TEU Network, represented here by the authors of this piece, suggest that the TEU have focused on maintaining good relationships with university management over the specific needs of tertiary staff, especially those on precarious contracts…
Book Forum
Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (2022) examines the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the first colonial emigration scheme to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial grievances. Moving from the formation of the New Zealand Company in the 1830s to the Hokianga Dog Tax Uprising at the close of the nineteenth century, this book reveals the inext…
Constitutional Transformation in Chile
Camila Vergara, interviewed by Neil Vallelly
Selling Out in the High Country
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023, 423 pp Among the many pleasures of reading Eleanor Catton’s idiosyncratic fiction is her sheer inventiveness, the sense that she likes to set herself difficult or even improbable writing challenges. Her works hover on the boundaries of established genres—coming of age in her first novel The Rehearsal (2008), crime fiction in The Luminaries (2013)—while refusing to ab…
You Know What, It Is the Money’
What if the inability to refuse care work is baked into the very category of care?’ asks Heather Berg. This article draws from Berg’s ‘reproductivism’ to argue that people who labour on the margins of capitalist society articulate crucial critiques of and resistance to the system of work. Berg’s arguments are brought together with 2020 interviews with indoor sex workers in Aotearoa New Zealand, where sex work was decriminalised in 2003. This arti…
The Eclipse
‘It is the only democracy in the Middle East’—this is a standard refrain about Israel. Some stand by it; others refute it. Many argue that Benjamin Netanyahu has been eroding democratic values in Israel over the last decade; others insist that so-called Israeli democracy is premised on the oppression and killing of Palestinians, which thus undermines the universalist principles of liberal democracy. While many disagree on Israel’s democratic cred…
Fictitious University
Issue 14 (2023) editorial by Neil Vallelly
Activating Aroha
Brooke Fiafia reflects on her experiences attending the social movements conference with a group of fierce and loving women. While critiquing conference spaces, she talks about the aroha that drew her to this particular conference. Aroha, as she writes, is necessary for our shared humanity. It is what was activated in the creation of the conference and what was explored in conference conversations and sharings about transformation, connection, re…
Ngā Mahi o Rarohenga
We need to include ending violence in our organising, or our movements will fail to build a better world. Rarohenga is an ideal that can inspire us to think beyond our messy realities where violence is thriving. It reminds us that the foundations of strong communities are connections and care. We can organise safer, nurturing, and powerful movements. Learning about violence and growing connection and care in our movements can help us rebuild our …
Ko Wai Tēnei e Tū Ake Nei? Activating Collectivity and Accountability Through Grounded Positioning
Building on conference conversations about positionality—about who we are and how our identities shape our views of the world, about the connections and disconnections experienced between us, and about our proximities to place, power, and privilege—this piece brings together four conference participants to continue to reflect on what positionality means, on why it is important, and on how to practice it in non-performative, well-developed, and mu…
Reflections from Kōtare
Members of the core crew of Kōtare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa have attended each of the five conferences in the Social Movements, Resistance, and Social Change series. We have always been excited by the possibilities these conferences have offered for engendering deeper connections and new opportunities for group formation and action across different sectors in the left-activist and academic worlds. We offered three work…
Caring for Whenua
Bringing the summit of Mauna Kea and the lands of Ihumātao to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, leaders and protectors Pua Case and Pania Newton come together to discuss what it means to be in Indigenous-led movements that centre Indigenous rights, rituals, and protocols. In a moving keynote conversation, they talk about the work that comes with caring for whenua or ́āina in personal, relational, and sacred ways; they reflect on the importance of solidarities…
The Habilitation Centre Ideal
This article examines the potential role of ‘habilitation centres’ in the Labour government’s attempts to reduce the prison population, starting with the recent recommendations of an expert panel who called for the ‘gradual replacement of most prisons with community-based habilitation centres’. I trace this idea to the Roper report in the 1980s, showing how its emergence in Aotearoa New Zealand was shaped by problematic models of community correc…
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Censorship and Surveillance in the First World War
Review of Jared Davidson, Dead Letters. A history of state censorship, the New Zealand home front, and undelivered mail during the Great War
Dairying, Dispossession, Devastation
The past three-and-a-half decades of neoliberal orthodoxy in New Zealand have been marked by the rapid expansion and intensification of the New Zealand dairy industry. In the years since direct agricultural subsidies and supports were removed in the mid-1980s, the national dairy herd has more than doubled and the area given over to dairying has increased by some 750,000 hectares. This relentless drive to intensify has come at a simply enormous en…
Māori Mārx
This article gathers together some provisional materials for the construction of a Māori Mārx. I begin by following Marx’s thought as he continually complexifies his understanding of the determinants of history in his search for the proper starting place for a materialist dialectics. I leave historical Marx at the close of his life, occupied with the passionate study of Indigenous modes of life. Returning his gaze, I read Marx from an Indigenous …
Sex Workers’ Rights in Aotearoa New Zealand
The New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC) is an organisation founded on the rights, welfare, health, and safety of sex workers in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally. The collective is committed to ensuring the agency of sex workers in all aspects of life. After years of lobbying by the NZPC to overturn an archaic law founded on double standards, whereby sex workers and third parties were prosecuted for acts such as soliciting and brothel keep…
Pity, Hate, Resentment, and the Left
This intervention argues that our understanding of negative emotions is underdeveloped due to the urge to expel negativity from the personal and political spheres. By invoking the antagonism of Chantal Mouffe’s philosophy, the article provides a conceptual grounding of pity, hate, and resentment by explaining these emotions based on whether the person feeling them sees the other as inferior, equal, or superior. For the Left, the intervention argu…
Feminine Praxis
Dresses and skirts are emblematic of a feminine style and also of women’s subordination to men. But the fashion these days for what is erroneously called gender-neutral or unisex clothing is neither a sign of progress nor of victory of feminists against patriarchy. For while in protest of their physical and symbolic impositions women were abandoning feminine affect and apparel, without the political motive and under no pressure to do likewise, me…
Imagining the Feminist Revolution
Review of Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood. A case for the enduring relevance of Shulamith Firestone
A Socialist Compass for Aotearoa
In this article, I argue that both tino rangatiratanga and socialism lie at the heart of emancipatory politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. For Māori, the economy has always been a dynamic site of interaction with the state and corporate bodies, and today the Māori economy is celebrated by some as a space where tino rangatiratanga can be realised. For the most part, though, the capitalist economy has been a site of exploitation for Māori. Given the i…
Age of the Void
Review of Marco Revelli, The New Populism. A detailed account of the erosion of the liberal centre and the spread of populism across the United States, United Kingdom, and continental Europe
Can Deliberative Democracy Put an End to Neoliberalism in Settler-Colonial States
Review of Max Rashbrooke, Government for the Public Good. Deliberative democracy as a cure for the ills of neoliberalism in a settler-colonial state
Spatial Justice—Decolonising Our Cities and Settlements
In my recently published book Rebuilding the Kāinga, I championed the idea of kāinga in a contemporary sense: integrated housing; cultural and communal facilities; sustainable use and management of whenua, awa, and moana; and sustainable economic activities. If implemented widely, the kāinga model will also have profound impacts on how we in Aotearoa New Zealand (Māori, Pākehā, and Tauiwi—all of us) plan our homes, towns, and cities. In this inte…
The Team of Six Million
After seven weeks of lockdown from late March through to May, the so-called ‘team of five million’ had (temporarily) defeated the virus and the country’s focus swung back to the border and the threat posed by returning New Zealanders. As a companion piece to Murdoch Stephen’s intervention in this issue of Counterfutures, this intervention employs Chantal Mouffe’s reading of ‘Schmitt against Schmitt’ as a heuristic device for discussing the figure…
Chlöe Swarbrick’s Auckland Central Victory
In the 2020 election, Chlöe Swarbrick won the Green party’s second-ever electorate seat, in Auckland Central. A high-profile candidate, an experienced campaign team, some favourable conditions, and mass engagement enabled Swarbrick to build a winning coalition. For socialists, who are returning to electoral politics throughout liberal democracies, the skills required to win electoral campaigns are key. With an emphasis on ‘building a community, n…
The Right to Housing
An introduction to this special issue of Counterfutures
Community Organising
Mohan Dutta, Director of the Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University talks with Sue Bradford, the centre’s first activist-in-residence in Aotearoa New Zealand. The conversation outlines the role of community organising in communication for social change, with both Mohan and Sue drawing on their work in grassroots organising at the margins. Mohan and Sue detail the role of voice infrastructures at…
A Case for Universal State Housing in Aotearoa New Zealand
In contemporary debates about solutions to the housing crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand, state housing is side-lined. But there have been renewed calls internationally for expanding state provision of housing. Some of these calls have been to expand the criteria of access to state housing to make it more universal, ensuring everyone has a home and challenging housing as an investment. This article presents a case for universal state housing in Aote…
Driving Through the East
This intervention asks how the people of Porirua can feel empowered and included in the decision-making processes that will shape the future of their city. I draw on my experiences as a life-long resident, activist, artist, architect, landscape architect, and urban designer in Porirua to find answers. I have found that young Pasifika are very concerned about whether their cultural values will be represented in housing and development in Porirua. …
Towards a Left Secretariat for the Pacific
The Pacific Islands region occupies a vast ocean continent, consisting of a diversity of cultures. What draws the islands together is a shared experience of economic dependency and vulnerability driven by global warming, geopolitical competition, and class divisions. Together, these factors account for poor performance on a range of development indicators, including policy and inequality. It is in this context that Epeli Hau‘ofa has argued that t…
Watch Them Closely
The method employed in this intervention is an active performance in writing, using the voice of a docent, who guides a small party of the curious, and possibly bewildered, on a walking tour of Auckland’s inner-city monuments. The subject of what gets commissioned, created, and installed under the general heading of a public monument can be placed within the context of the recent and continuing range of disputes and confrontations about monuments…
Engaging Communities in the Design of Homes and Neighbourhoods in Aotearoa New Zealand
Community engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand is a variable practice. Generally driven by local and central government, much of it could be described as superficial at worst and naïve at best. This paper sets out concerns with existing practice as evidenced by my own experiences working on projects with local and central government. Drawing heavily on Atawhai Tibble’s tips for engaging with Māori, I outline how we might move engagement towards mea…
Keywords
Using the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) maritime exercises as an example, this keywords entry explores the concept of militarism and seeks to understand ideologies of justified violence in relation to the structure of settler colonialism and the logics of white supremacy. Using three brief reflections from RIMPAC 2020, I examine how militarism sustains, and is sustained by, racial hierarchies and colonial power. I also draw links to the Co…
Imagining Beyond Decolonisation
Review of Bianca Elkington et al, Imagining Decolonisation. An ‘ethic of restoration’ as a third way between Fanonian rupture and the exclusionary performativity of Pākehā overtures to decolonisation
A Global Fix
Review of Raquel Rolnik, Urban Warfare. A global panorama of housing policy in the era of footloose financial capital
Welcome Home, Prodigy
Drawing from the author’s childhood confusion over whether ‘prodigal’ means profligate or prodigious, this intervention anticipates the politicisation of returning New Zealand citizens. Written during lockdown, the intervention contrasts predictions of a great repatriation and pundits’ nationalistic revelling in the country’s success at containing the virus with the history of the ‘coming home’ essay and song. Stephen’s argues for a pre-considera…
Workplace Restructuring and its Discontents
This article analyses the role of fetish—unspoken attachments—within and against the 2020 proposal to restructure the College of Sciences at Massey University.I look at the roles played by three forms of fetish: the commodity fetish, the fetishisation of intellectual labour, and the fetish of knowledge-without-consequences. I analyse the restructuring and its opposition by mapping these fetishes and the deadlocks to which they lead. In addition t…