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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > General
The Watsonville Canning strike was a dramatic show of the power by women workers whose struggle became a rallying point for the Chicano movement. In the course of the strike, a virtually moribund local union was revitalised, and Watsonville's Latino majority emerged as a major force in local politics.
Migrants have become an important social and political constituency throughout the world. In addition to sending remittances to their home countries, many migrants maintain political ties with their nations of origin through the expansion of dual citizenship and voting rights. Some even return home to participate in local and national-level politics. But to what extent do migrants influence their home communities and governments? Mexican migrants fought for and won the right to dual nationality in 1997 and the right to vote from abroad in presidential elections in 2005. As the country with the world's second largest emigrant population, many expected that the enfranchisement of the Mexican diaspora would powerfully shape the direction of Mexican politics. Scholars, policy makers, and migrant politicians have argued that migrants who exercise these rights will, through contact with the U.S. political system and culture, develop more democratic attitudes and behaviors, and in turn, help to democratize their home states. However, only a tiny share of the Mexican diaspora community exercised their voting rights in the 2006 and 2012 elections. And, as this book shows, though migrants do engage socially and politically in their communities of origin and at times powerfully impact political dynamics there, the outcomes don't uniformly enhance local democracy. For example, while this research finds that migrants from non-elite backgrounds were able to parlay their migrant experience into a path to power in their home states, non-migrant politicians have been more successful at maintaining stability after election, due to their ties to the dominant governing parties. Even when migrant political actors intend to open up the political systems of their home towns, bring about needed reforms, or improve governance, the impact of their engagement at the aggregate level of municipal politics depends on a range of intervening factors, most importantly the nature of their interactions with non-migrant political actors in their home states and municipalities. Here, Michael S. Danielson develops a theory of and methodological model for studying migrant impact on the communities and countries they leave behind, examining a largely underexplored area of research in the migration literature.
At the heart of this book is what would appear to be a striking and fundamental paradox: the espousal of a 'scientific' doctrine that sought to eliminate 'dysgenics' and champion the 'fit' as a means of 'race' survival by a political and social movement that ostensibly believed in the destruction of the state and the removal of all hierarchical relationships. What explains this reception of eugenics by anarchism? How was eugenics mobilised by anarchists as part of their struggle against capitalism and the state? What were the consequences of this overlap for both anarchism and eugenics as transnational movements? -- .
Civil society actors contested the fifty-year long transition to a global economy based on the principles of neoliberalism. Mobilization against neoliberal measures represents one of the most common forms of social-movement activity across the world. We explore the evolution of resistance to economic liberalization from the 1970s to the current period. Our study highlights several dimensions of civic opposition to the implementation of free market policies, including: forms of neoliberalism; geographic distribution of protest events across world regions and time; and outcomes of movement campaigns.
In this book, Ibrahim employs Bourdieu's key concepts in order to explain the complex dynamics of social movements by detailing the key stages of development of, and ideological conflict between, 21st century British anti-capitalist organizations, and their interactions with wider social and political forces.
A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking writing on race in America, including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more From the pages of the New Yorker comes a bold and telling portrait of Black life in America, with astonishing early work from Rebecca West's account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin's 'Letter from a Region in My Mind' (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time) to more recent writing by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, Malcolm Gladwell, Elizabeth Alexander, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen St. Felix, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kelefa Sanneh, and more. Reaching back across the last century, The Matter of Black Lives includes a wide array of material from the New Yorker archives ranging across essays, reported pieces, profiles, criticism, and historical pieces. This book addresses everything from the arts to civil rights, matters of justice, and politics, and brings us up to the present day with accounts of what Jelani Cobb calls "The American Spring." The result is a startling, nuanced and, ultimately, indelible portrait of America's complex relationship with race.
In this eye-opening true story about immigrants in America, a visionary labor leader devises a plan that wins the citizenship of 500 workers from India after being exposed to inhumane conditions. In late 2006, Saket Soni, a 28-year-old, Indian-born community organizer received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to $20,000 each to apply for this "opportunity" to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, putting their families into impossible debt. During a series of clandestine meetings, Soni and the workers devise a bold plan. In The Great Escape, Soni traces the workers' extraordinary escape, their march on foot to Washington DC, and their 23-day-hunger strike to bring attention to their cause. Along the way, ICE agents try to deport the men, company officials work to discredit them, and politicians avert their eyes. But none of this shakes the workers' determination to win their dignity and keep their promises to their families. Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of 21st-century forced labor, Soni takes us into the hidden lives of the foreign workers the US increasingly relies on for cheap skilled labor to rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape is the astonishing story of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history--and the workers' heroic journey for justice.
Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present.David DiMeo focuses on the work of three leading writers whose socially committed fiction was adapted to the disenchantment and discontent of the late twentieth century: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Despite their disappointments with the direction of Egyptian society in the decades following the 1952 revolution, they kept the spirit of committed literature alive through a deeply introspective examination of the relationship between the writer, the public, and political power.Reaching back to the roots of this literary movement, DiMeo examines the development of committed literature from its European antecedents to its peak of influence in the 1950s, and contrasts the committed works with those of disillusionment that followed. Committed to Disillusion is vital reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature and the modern history and politics of the Middle East.
In this uplifting memoir, a professor and activist shares what birds can teach us about life, social change, and protecting the environment. Trish O’Kane never expected to be a birder. She was a world-traveled journalist with no science background who surprised herself in her forties by falling in love with birds. Cut to seventeen years later, and O’Kane is a highly qualified ornithologist who teaches at the University of Vermont and is the creator of the hugely popular course Birding to Change the World, on which this book is based. It was a lone red cardinal and a bumptious cast of house sparrows that changed everything for O’Kane after Hurricane Katrina shattered her life in New Orleans. Watching birds thrive throughout the devastated city became her salvation—making her laugh, helping her deal with the trauma, and setting her on a whole new path. Soon O’Kane found herself pursuing a natural sciences PhD in Wisconsin, where she became a full-on bird obsessive—logging hours and hours in a stunningly diverse urban park, binoculars glued to her eyes, filling field notebooks with observations of bird doings and dramas, and volunteering in a bird nursery at a wildlife rehabilitation center. But it wasn’t until that park, her bird-watching haven, was threatened with development that O’Kane became an environmental activist—taking her cues from the birds. She began to avianize: to adapt for human use birds’ strategies for defending their nests and offspring. Like the birds, she and her fellow human park lovers harnessed the power of raised voices and collective action to save the park. Each chapter in Birding to Change the World features at least one species of bird that O’Kane has learned from. She recounts the astonishing science of bird life, including migration and survival strategies, along with many moving and compelling stories about birds and the humans who are fascinated by them. Over the course of this heartfelt memoir, O’Kane shows what birds can teach us—and how that education can be a transformative force for social change.
After decades of steady progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, several parts of Europe are facing new waves of resistance to a so-called 'gender ideology' or 'gender theory'. Opposition to progressive gender equality is manifested in challenges to marriage equality, abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, sex education, sexual liberalism, transgender rights, antidiscrimination policies and even to the notion of gender itself. This book examines how an academic concept of gender, when translated by religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, can become a mobilizing tool for, and the target of, social movements. How can we explain religious discourses about sex difference turning intro massive street demonstrations? How do forms of organization and protest travel across borders? Who are the actors behind these movements? This collection is a transnational and comparative attempt to better understand anti-gender mobilizations in Europe. It focuses on national manifestations in eleven European countries, including Russia, from massive street protests to forms of resistance such as email bombarding and street vigils. It examines the intersection of religious politics with rising populism and nationalistic anxieties in contemporary Europe.
This book analyzes the systematic construction of the image of the Other (that is, non-Muslims) by two radical Islamic Groups, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia and Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia. The author documents discourse patterns in the groups' publications and speeches stereotyping non-Muslims as hostile towards Islam and imagining Islam's imminent victory after an inevitable clash with all other civilizations. Although these groups do not engage in physical violence, the author categorizes their efforts to stereotype non-Muslims as "symbolic violence" and counterproductive because of the religious and ethnic pluralism of Indonesian society. Muhammad Iqbal Ahnaf is a lecturer and researcher at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University and at Darul Ulum Islamic University, Lamongan, Indonesia.
The SASO/BPC trial which took place from October 1974 until December 21st 1974 played an intrinsic role in the surge of Black Consciousness thought. An ideology founded by Stephen Bantu Biko, which wished to relay the unspoken strength and spirit of the African people. It was seen to be a way of thought developed for the African people to reclaim confidence within their skin tone. As the trail commenced in the year 1974, little was known about the ideology’s founder – Steve Biko, aside from his colleagues and followers of the movement, as his whereabouts and communication had been limited as the Apartheid government had ordered a ban on Biko; thereby restricting his movements and communication with individuals. When Steve entered the Pretoria courtroom in Pretoria as a star witness to deliver his testimony on Black Consciousness, in the three-month trial; those who had heard of the myth of the man named Biko, got to witness him in court. This, gave traction and new-found understanding to the teachings of Black Consciousness. This book focuses solely on his testimony, as said in his words. The spoken words that ignited the momentum of resistance that could not be stopped.
***** 'So deeply gripping and inspiring...It will stay with me, always.' - Annie Macmanus In 2008, 21-year-old Lady Unchained got involved in a fight in a club while trying to protect her sister. Serving 11 months of her prison sentence, her life changed completely. Inside, Lady Unchained began to write, while battling isolation, loneliness and the fear of being wrongly deported. These notes became powerful bars of poetry, capturing first-hand the broken justice system and the racism rooted within it. Wide-awake poetry, Behind Bars traces how Lady Unchained's identity was irrevocably changed during her sentencing, time in prison and release. Behind Bars proves there is life after prison.
Gendering the State is a ground-breaking collection of studies that examines the efforts of women in countries all over the world to frame public policy debates on nationally critical issues in gendered terms. This is the latest volume in the Research Network on Gender and the State (RNGS) collaborative studies. Using the RNGS model of women's movement and women's policy actor strategies to influence public policy debates and state response, the book looks at data gathered from ten European countries (including Finland and Sweden), plus Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United States from the 1990s to today. The overall study is grouped into three distinct patterns of state change: state downsizing particularly in social policy areas (Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Spain); expansion of state activities into previously less-regulated areas (Austria, France, Germany, and Sweden); and transformation often constitutionally based of representative structures (Australia, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom). Examination of these patterns reveals the impact of the changes in state structures and national priorities on the effectiveness and ability of women's movement actors in achieving their goals."
In October of 2014, 12-year-old Sasha Lutt read from a tiny Torah scroll as a part of her bat mitzvah in the Women's section of the plaza at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site. Surrounded by members of the multi-denominational organization, the Women of the Wall, one of whom had smuggled the scroll into the plaza, Sasha became the first woman to read from the Torah at the site. For more than twenty five years, the Women of the Wall have been waging a campaign to gain the Israeli government's permission to pray at the Western Wall. Despite widespread media coverage, this is the first comprehensive study of their struggle. Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez offer an in-depth analysis of the Women of the Wall's attempts to modify Jewish-orthodox mainstream religious practice from within and invest it with a new, egalitarian content. They present a comprehensive survey of the numerous legal rulings about the case and consider the broader political and social significance of the Women of the Wall's activism. In this way, Jobani and Perez are able to address broader issues of religion-state relations: How should governments manage religious plurality within their borders? How should governments respond to the requests of minorities that conflict with ostensibly mainstream interpretations of a given tradition? How should governments manage disputed sacred sites and spaces located in the public sphere? Women of the Wall: Navigating Religion in Sacred Sites offers a critical new look at theories of religion-state relations and a fresh examination of religious conflicts over sacred sites and public spaces.
Although rights-based claims are diversifying and opportunities and resources for claims-making have improved, obtaining rights protections and catalysing social change in South Korea remain challenging processes. This volume examines how different groups in South Korea have defined and articulated grievances and mobilized to remedy them. It explores developments in the institutional contexts within which rights claiming occurs and in the sources of support available for utilizing different claims-making channels. Drawing on scores of original interviews, readings of court rulings and statutes, primary archival and digital sources, and interpretive analysis of news media coverage in Korean, this volume illuminates rights in action. The chapters uncover conflicts over contending rights claims, expose disparities between theory and practice in the law, trace interconnections among rights-based movements, and map emerging trends in the use of rights language. Case studies examine the rights of women, workers, people with disabilities, migrants, and sexual minorities.
Chartism is an essential introduction to the movement, and examines
the controversial debates surrounding the topic. As well as
providing a concise period background, the author includes
discussion of:
Political hackers, like the infamous Anonymous collective, have demonstrated their willingness to use political violence to further their agendas. However, many of their causes - targeting terrorist groups, fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, and protecting people's freedom of expression, autonomy and privacy - are intuitively good things to fight for. This book will create a new framework that argues that when the state fails to protect people, hackers can intervene and evaluates the hacking based on the political or social circumstances. It highlights the space for hackers to operate as legitimate actors; guides hacker activity by detailing what actions are justified toward what end; outlines mechanisms to aid hackers in reaching ethically justified decisions; and directs the political community on how to react to these political hackers. Applying this framework to the most pivotal hacking operations within the last two decades, including the Arab Spring, police brutality in the USA and the Nigerian and Ugandan governments' announcements of homophobic legislation, it offers a unique contribution to conceptualising hacking as a contemporary political activity
Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin's Russia, and China two months after Mao's revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment-an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating black women of the twentieth century. Chronicling Essie's eventful life, the book explores her influence on her husband's early career and how she later achieved her own unique political voice. Essie's friendships with a host of literary icons and world leaders, her renown as a fierce defender of justice, her defiant testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous anti-communist committee, and her unconventional open marriage that endured for over 40 years-all are brought to light in the pages of this inspiring biography. Essie's indomitable personality shines through, as do her contributions to United States and twentieth-century world history.
The political writings of Eva Gore-Booth brings together a fascinating array of material from this important Irish author and political activist. The volume includes a selection of letters, political pamphlets, newspaper articles and poetry relating to key aspects of Irish and British events of the early twentieth century; events which are now entering centenary commemorations. The volume is presented in three sections focusing on women's suffrage and women's trade unionism, pacifism and conscientious objection during the First World War, and Irish nationalism before independence. Many of these writings are out of print and difficult to source, and this volume offers a valuable research and teaching resource. -- .
In the first book of its kind, Bassel and Emejulu explore minority women's experiences of and resistances to austerity measures in France and Britain. Minority women are often portrayed as passive victims. However, Minority women and austerity demonstrates how they use their race, class, gender and legal status as a resource for collective action in the face of the neoliberal colonisation of non-governmental organisations, the failures of left-wing politics and the patronising initiatives of policy-makers. Using in-depth case studies, this book explores the changing relations between the state, the market and civil society which create opportunities and dilemmas for minority women activists. Through an intersectional 'politics of survival' these women seek to subvert the dominant narratives of 'crisis' and 'activism'.
The New Yorker's award-winning war correspondent returns to his own country to chronicle a story of mounting civic breakdown and violent disorder, in a vivid eyewitness narrative of revelatory explanatory power. On the morning of January 6, a gallows was erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A little after noon, as thousands of Trump supporters marched past the structure, some paused to climb its wooden steps and take pictures of the US Capitol framed within an oval noose. Up ahead, the dull thud of stun grenades could be heard, accompanied by bright flashes. Several people carried Confederate flags. Others had Tasers, baseball bats, bear spray, and truncheons. 'They need help!' a man shouted. 'It's us versus the cops!' No one seemed surprised by what was taking place. There was an eerie sense of inexorability, mixed with nervous hesitation. It reminded me of combat: the slightly shocked, almost bashful moment when bravado, fantasy, and training crash against reality. In early 2020, Luke Mogelson, who had been living in France and covering the Global War on Terrorism, returned home to report on the social discord that the pandemic was bringing to the fore in the US. Soon, he found himself embedded with militias descending on the Michigan state capitol. From there, the story swept him on to Minneapolis, then to Portland, and ultimately to Washington, D.C. His stories for The New Yorker were hailed as essential first drafts of history. They were just the tip of the iceberg. The Storm Is Here is the definitive eyewitness account of how--during a season of sickness, economic uncertainty, and violence--a large segment of Americans became convinced that they needed to rise up against dark forces plotting to take their country away from them, and then did just that. It builds month by month, through vivid depictions of events on the ground, from the onset of the pandemic to the attack on the US Capitol--during which Mogelson was in the Senate chamber with the insurrectionists--and its aftermath. Bravely reported and beautifully written, Mogelson's book follows the tradition of some of the essential chronicles of war and unrest of our time.
***** PERFECT FOR FANS OF 'THE COMING STORM' ONE OF THE TELEGRAPH'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'A chilling overview of a movement that should arguably have no place in any healthy, well-educated society.' - The Telegraph 'A compelling book.' - The Guardian 'The Storm Is Upon Us is an impressive piece of research and a gripping read. Rothschild's book reads like a thriller, with cliffhangers that leave you eager for the next episode. The trouble, of course, is that it's not fiction.' - The Times 'For anyone who fears that the world really has 'gone mad', this book might be essential reading' - The Telegraph 'An ideal tour guide for your journey into the depths of the rabbit hole that is QAnon, and even shows you a glimmer of light at the exit.' - Cullen Hoback, director of HBO's Q: Into the Storm In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as 'the calm before the storm'-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists. But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called 'Q Clearance Patriot' began an elaboration all of their own. Q's wild yarn hinted at a vast conspiracy that satisfied the deepest desires of MAGA-America. None of Q's predictions came to pass. But did that stop people from clinging to every word, expanding Q's mythology, and promoting it ever more widely? No. Conspiracy culture expert Mike Rothschild is uniquely equipped to explain QAnon, from the cults that first fed into it, to its embrace by Trump and the right-wing media. With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Instead, he argues that QAnon tells us everything we need to know about global fear after Trump-and that we need to understand it now, because it's not going away. |
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