Frances C. Galt explores the role of trade unions and women's activism in the British film and television industries in this important contribution to debates around gender inequality. The book traces the influence of the union for technicians and other behind-the-camera workers and examines the relationship between gender and class in the labour movement. Drawing on previously unseen archival material and oral history interviews with activists, it casts new light on women's experiences of union participation and feminism over nine decades. As concerns about the gender pay gap, women's rights and harassment continue, it assesses historical progress and points the way to further change in film and TV.

Using international perspectives and case studies, this book discusses the relationships between community development and populism in the context of today's widespread crisis of democracy. It investigates the development, meanings and manifestations of contemporary forms of populism and explores the synergies and contradictions between the values and practices of populism and community development. Contributors examine the ways that the ascendancy of right-wing populist politics is influencing the landscapes within which community development is located and they offer new insights on how the field can understand and respond to the challenges of populism.

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.

This book probes the vitality, potentiality and ability of new communication and technological changes to drive online-based civil action across Africa. In a continent booming with mobile innovation and a plethora of social networking sites, the Internet is considered a powerful platform used by pro-democracy activists to negotiate and sometimes push for reform-based political and social changes in Africa. The book discusses and theorizes digital activism within social and geo-political realms, analysing cases such as the #FeesMustFall and #BringBackOurGirls campaigns in South Africa and Nigeria respectively to question the extent to which they have changed the dynamics of digital activism in sub-Saharan Africa. Comparative case study reflections in eight African countries identify and critique digital concepts questioning what impact they have had on the civil society. Cases also explore the African LGBT community as a social movement while discussing opportunities and challenges faced by online activists fighting for LGBT equality. Finally, gender-based activists using digital tools to gain attention and facilitate social changes are also appraised.

In the early 1900s, Detroit's clubwomen successfully lobbied for issues like creating playgrounds for children, building public baths, raising the age for child workers, and reforming the school board and city charter. But when they won the vote in 1918, Detroit's clubwomen, both black and white, were eager to incite even greater change. In the 1920s, they fought to influence public policy at the municipal and state level, while contending with partisan politics, city politics, and the media, which often portrayed them as silly and incompetent. In this fascinating volume, author Jayne Morris-Crowther examines the unique civic engagement of these women who considered their commitment to the city of Detroit both a challenge and a promise. By the 1920s, there were eight African American clubs in the city (Willing Workers, Detroit Study Club, Lydian Association, In As Much Circle of Kings Daughters, Labor of Love Circle of Kings Daughters, West Side Art and Literary Club, Altar Society of the Second Baptist Church, and the Earnest Workers of the Second Baptist Church); in 1921, they joined together under the Detroit Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Nearly 15,000 mostly white clubwomen were represented by the Detroit Federation of Women's Clubs, which was formed in 1895 by the unification of the Detroit Review Club, Twentieth Century Club, Detroit Woman's Club, Woman's Historical Club, Clio Club, Wednesday History Club, Hypathia, and Zatema Club. Morris-Crowther begins by investigating the roots of the clubs in pre-suffrage Detroit and charts their growing power. She goes on to consider the women's work in three areas-Policies That Affect Women and Children, Protecting the Home against Enemies, and Home as Part of the Urban Environment-and considers the numerous challenges they faced in The Limits of Enfranchised Citizens. An appendix contains the 1926 Directory of the Detroit Federation of Women's Clubs. In the end, Morris-Crowther shows that Detroit's clubwomen pioneered new lobbying techniques like personal interviews, and used political education in savvy ways to bring politics to the community level. This volume will be interesting reading for enthusiasts of Detroit history and readers wanting to learn more about women and politics of the 1920s.

A well written, interesting biography of a man, who fought for liberal ideals and for progress in Central Europe but was forced to spend the latter half of his life in America. Oscar Jaszi was a historian, political theorist and sociologist, who dedicated his tremendous intellect to modern democracy in Hungary. Exiled from his homeland, Jaszi's moral courage stood strong against the political tyranny and totalitarianism of the interwar period that nearly destroyed Hungary's political and social foundations. From his early years in Budapest to his later life as professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, he worked tirelessly for what he described as "a new moral, social, and economic synthesis is needed." The life of Oscar Jaszi represents one of the great triumphs of reason over violence, regardless of the defeat of his vision for a 'Danubian Federation,' and his subsequent exile. His vow to not be buried in an undemocratic Hungary was kept, and as his country emerged from the ruins of the Soviet block, his remains were transferred to Budapest in 1991, a symbol of his lasting philosophy and the spirit of his will.

"A great read."-Whoopi Goldberg, The View How the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divide On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro," and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America's racial divide today. Born in New York City only fifteen months apart, the Harlem-raised Baldwin and the privileged Buckley could not have been more different, but they both rose to the height of American intellectual life during the civil rights movement. By the time they met in Cambridge, Buckley was determined to sound the alarm about a man he considered an "eloquent menace." For his part, Baldwin viewed Buckley as a deluded reactionary whose popularity revealed the sickness of the American soul. The stage was set for an epic confrontation that pitted Baldwin's call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley's unabashed elitism and implicit commitment to white supremacy. A remarkable story of race and the American dream, The Fire Is upon Us reveals the deep roots and lasting legacy of a conflict that continues to haunt our politics.

Lengthening hours, lessening pay, no parental leave, scant job security. Never have so many workers needed so much support. Yet the very labour unions that could garner us protections and help us speak up for ourselves are growing weaker every day. In an age of rampant inequality, of increasing social protest and strikes-and when a majority of workers say they want to be union members - why does union density continue to decline? In this compelling new book, Shaun Richman offers some answers. But bringing unions back from the edge of institutional annihilation, says Richman, is no simple proposition. The next few years offer a rare opportunity to undo the great damage wrought on labour by decades of corporate union-busting, if only union activists raise our ambitions. Based on deft historical research and legal analysis, as well as his own experience as a union organizing director, Richman lays out an action plan for U.S. workers in the twenty-first century by which we can internalize the concept that workers are equal human beings, entitled to health care, dignity, job security-and definitely, the right to strike. Unafraid to take on some of the labour movement's sacred cows, this book describes what it would take-some changes that are within activists' power and some that require meaningful legal reform-to put unions in workplaces across America.

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, Dabrowski makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state's legitimization of austerity and women's everyday experiences, she reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, this book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity. Austerity, Women and the Role of the State is shortlisted for the 2021 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Flashes in her Soul is the story of Jabu Ndlovu, a shop steward of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and a community leader in Imbali near Pietermaritzburg. Jabu, her husband and her oldest daughter were killed in a brutal attack on their home in May 1989. This story shows the courage and compassion with which Jabu fought against all forms of exploitation. Her story represents the experiences of thousands of women who struggled and suffered as a result of the war in KwaZulu-Natal in the 1980s and 1990s. Jabu’s story reminds us of the devastation that violence brings to families, communities and organisations. The politics and dynamics behind the violence today are not the same as in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the need remains for strong and moral leaders like Jabu to speak out and organise against the violence and the moral corruption that lies behind it. First published in 1991, this is the second book in the Hidden Voices Series. The Hidden Voices Series emerged out of an interest in left intellectual contributions towards discussions on race, class, ethnicity and nationalism in South Africa. Before and during the apartheid years, many universities were closed to existing local ideas and debates, and critical intellectual debates, ideas, texts, poetry and songs often originated outside academia during the period of the struggle for liberation. The Hidden Voices Series seeks to publish key texts, books, documents and other materials that were never published under apartheid, or seminal books that have gone out of print. We hope that these recovered, lost or forgotten voices will help reinvigorate the humanities and social sciences, and contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge production in South Africa and indeed throughout Africa.

Contains an Open Access chapter. Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions portrays the critical role of mass connection in the success of any movement, resurrection, protest, and revolution. The communication mechanisms for this connection have, at times, evolved and elsewhere undergone revolutions of their own. Authors debate this relationship, and the strategies and lessons of 'connecting to the masses' considering the development of media, technology and communication strategies over the last century. Key topics covered include revolution, communication, protest and technology, spanning from the Russian Revolution to the present day. The discussion is not limited to historic cases of technology and revolution, nor to contemporary ones. The book, therefore, generates a debate about how art, media and communication technologies have been operationalized to connect, mobilize and organize, in different historical times, and in diverse national, political, and socio-economic contexts.

This edited volume analyses different forms of resistance against international institutions and charts their success or failure in changing the normative orders embodied in these institutions. Non-state groups and specific states alike advocate alternative global politics, at the same time finding themselves demonized as pariahs and outlaws who disturb established systems of governance. However, over time, some of these actors not only manage to shake off such allegations, but even find their normative convictions accepted by international institutions. This book develops an innovative conceptual framework to understand and explain these processes, using seven cases studies in diverse policy fields; including international security, health, migration, religion and internet politics. This framework demonstrates the importance of coalition-building and strategic framing in order to form a successful resistance and bring change in world politics.

The strategic interactions between protestors and their targets shape the world around us in profound ways. The editors and contributors to Protesters and Their Targets-all leading scholars in the study of social movements-look at why movements do what they do and why their interactions with other societal actors turn out as they do. They recognize that targets are not stationary but react to the movement and require the movement to react back. This edited collection analyzes how social movements select their targets, movement-target interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Case studies examine school closures in Sweden, the U.S. labor movement, Bolivian water and Mexican corn, and other global issues to show the strategic thinking, shifting objectives, and various degrees of success in the actions and nature of these protest movements. Protesters and Their Targets seeks to develop a set of tools for the further development of the field's future work on this underexplored set of interactions.

The radical weekly newspaper or pamphlet was the leading print organ of popular radical expression during what has been called the heroic age of popular Radicalism; the years of public agitation for parlimentary reform between 1815 and 1820. This work reprints the original runs of the rarest periodicals.

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.

This book presents an overview of political communication in the Republic of Ireland from a multiplicity of perspectives and sources. It brings together academics and practitioners to examine the development and current shape of political communication in modern Ireland. It also examines what the future holds for political communication in an increasingly gatekeeper-free media landscape. The field of political communication, where journalists, public relations professionals and politicians intersect and interact, has always been a highly contested one fuelled by suspicion, mutual dependence and fraught relationships. While politicians need the media they remain highly suspicious of journalists. While journalists remain wary of politicians, they need access to them for information. For most of the time, what emerges is a relatively stable relationship of mutual dependence with the boundaries policed by public relation professions. However, every so often, in times of political crisis or upheaval, this relationship gives way to a near free-for-all. Politicians, spokespersons and sometimes even journalists, become fair game in the battle for public accountability and support. The determination of public relations professions to avoid this and keep the relationship based on mutual dependence has become a central component of modern statecraft and systems of governance. The need to keep politicians and the media 'on message' and use the media to inform, shape and manage public discourse has become central to the workings of government, opposition and interest groups. On the other hand, the packaging of politics has potentially troublesome implications for the democratic process. In the era of the instant news cycle, new technologies and constant opinion polling, just where does information end and misinformation begin? With millions being spent annually on advisors and 'spin-doctors', just where does media access end and media manipulation begin?

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.

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.

'John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London' - Mike Davis In a post-Trump world, the right is still very much in power. Significantly more than half the world's population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule. Today's autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers. But religious, economic, social and environmental differences aside, there is one thing that unites them - their hatred of the liberal, globalised world. This unity is their strength, and through control of government, civil society and the digital world they are working together across borders to stamp out the left. In comparison, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands - Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and Uruguay. So far they have been on the defensive, campaigning on local issues in their own countries. This narrow focus underestimates the resilience and global connectivity of the right. In this book, John Feffer speaks to the world's leading activists to show how international leftist campaigns must come together if they are to combat the rising tide of the right. A global Green New Deal, progressive trans-European movements, grassroots campaigning on international issues with new and improved language and storytelling are all needed if we are to pull the planet back from the edge of catastrophe. This book is both a warning and an inspiration to activists terrified by the strengthening wall of far-right power.

The Collected Papers 28 signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner. The title of the volume is taken from one of his most famous and eloquent short essays and probably the best known of his many broadcasts for the BBC. Man's Peril, 1954-55 not only captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid-1950s, its extraordinary impact served to jolt him into political protest once again. The activism of which we glimpse the initial stirrings in this volume continued in various guises more or less without interruption until his death. In the writings assembled in this volume, however, he is looking towards the non-aligned states and world scientific opinion as possible brokers of détente. (The volume includes Russell's famous public statement, the declaration of scientists known as 'The Russell-Einstein Manifesto'.) Although Russell was becoming increasingly immersed in work for peace, this was not to the exclusion of all other interests. For example, here we find also him reminiscing about his peace campaigning during the First World War, defending 'History as an Art', and attacking the obscurantism of obscenity legislation and the opponents of birth control.

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.

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.

As racist undercurrents in many western societies become manifestly entrenched, the prevalence of Islamophobia - and the need to understand what perpetuates it - has never been greater. Critiquing the arguments found in notionally left accounts and addressing the limitations of existing responses, What is Islamophobia? demonstrates that Islamophobia is not simply a product of abstract, or discursive, ideological processes, but of concrete social, political and cultural actions undertaken in the pursuit of certain interests. The book centres on what the editors refer to as the 'five pillars of Islamophobia': the institutions and machinery of the state; the far right, incorporating the counterjihad movement; the neoconservative movement; the transnational Zionist movement; and assorted liberal groupings including the pro-war left, and the new atheist movement. The book concludes with reflections on existing strategies for tackling Islamophobia, considering what their distinctive approaches mean for fighting back.