Padraig O'Malley's Perils & Prospects of a United Ireland presents the definitive study of the questions around the future of Northern Irish politics, including the idea of reunification. Focusing on the topics of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Good Friday Agreement, Brexit, Unionism, Nationalism, the economics of potential reunification or continued partition, and the wide range of Northern Irish identities, this work encompasses the most up-to-date and considered review of political actions so far. A must-read for those interested in the future of Northern Ireland.

Since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Koreatown has become increasingly fractured by intergenerational conflict, class polarization, and suburban flight. In the face of these struggles, community organizations can provide centralized resources and infrastructure to foster an ethnic consciousness and political solidarity among Korean Americans. This book analyzes the role of ethnic community-based organizations and the dynamics of contemporary Korean American politics. Drawing on two case studies, the author identifies diverse ways in which community-based organizations negotiate their political agendas and mainstream ties within the traditional ethnic power structures. One organization promotes middle-class ethnic goals through accommodation to immigrant leaders, while the other emphasizes social justice through alliances with outside interest groups. Both cases challenge the traditional assumption that assimilation undermines ethnicity as a meaningful framework for political identity and solidarity in immigrant groups. Legacies of Struggle reveals how community-based organizations create innovative spaces for political participation among new generations of Korean Americans.

This title centres around digital gender activism focusing on the implications that the phenomenon of online gender activism has for politics, society, culture and gender relations/dynamics. On December 16th, 2012, Jyoti Singh, a female psychotherapy student from New Delhi was raped by six men in a moving bus while making her way home with a male friend. After 13 days spent fighting for her life, Jyoti Singh passed away. Abiding by Indian laws, Joyti's actual name was never mentioned by the media and pseudonyms like 'Nirbhaya' (Hindi for fearless) were most commonly used. The brutal attack instantly triggered domestic and global criticism and widespread protests across India over the high levels of violence against Indian women and children, making it one of the biggest gender movements that the country has witnessed. The Nirbhaya case thus became a turning point in the politics of gender justice in India. The Nationwide protests that followed the case also witnessed one of the first and most extensive uses of digital technologies for activism in India having far reaching changes in how gender activism is conducted. Keeping the Nibhaya case at its core, this book explores and attempts to understand experiences and social constructs and investigate the use of digital technologies and social media by civil society actors, activists and organisations specifically for gender activism in India.

This book examines the rise and fall of the Chinese military business complex between the early 1980s and late 1990s. Based upon extensive primary source research, Cheung analyses the commercial success of this economic powerhouse, its impact on civil--military relations, and the broader benefits and drawbacks of the military's participation in money-making activities in relation to military professionalism and economic modernization.

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Jacqueline Jones presents not only the exceptional life of the famous American-born anarchist but also an authoritative account of her times-from slavery through the Great Depression.

Remembering Women's Activism examines the intersections between gender politics and acts of remembrance by tracing the cultural memories of women who are known for their actions. Memories are constantly being reinterpreted and are profoundly shaped by gender. This book explores the gendered dimensions of history and memory through nation-based and transnational case studies from the Asia-Pacific region and Anglophone world. Chapters consider how different forms of women's activism have been remembered: the efforts of suffragists in Britain, the USA and Australia to document their own histories and preserve their memory; Constance Markievicz and Qiu Jin, two early twentieth-century political activists in Ireland and China respectively; the struggles of women workers; and the movement for redress of those who have suffered militarized sexual abuse. The book concludes by reflecting on the mobilization of memories of activism in the present. Transnational in scope and with reference to both state-centred and organic acts of remembering, including memorial practices, physical sites of memory, popular culture and social media, Remembering Women's Activism is an ideal volume for all students of gender and history, the history of feminism, and the relationship between memory and history.

"A renegade Florence Nightingale cares for the ill in a remarkable tale of compassion and combating prejudice" The Guardian 'Breath-taking courage and compassion [...]a beautiful book' The Sunday Times 'An extraordinary tale' Evening Standard 'If I have one message with this book it's that we all have to care for one another. Today, not just in 1986. Life is about caring for each other, and I learned more about life from the dying than I ever learned from the living. It's in an elephant ride, it's in those wildflowers dancing on their way to the shared grave of two men in love, and it's in caring for that young man who just needed information without judgement.' In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Coker Burks visits a friend in hospital when she notices that the door to one of the patient's rooms is painted red. The nurses are reluctant to enter, drawing straws to decide who will tend to the sick person inside. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. And in doing so, Ruth's own life changes forever. As word spreads in the community that she is the only person willing to help the young men afflicted by the growing AIDS crisis, Ruth goes from being an ordinary young mother to an accidental activist. Forging deep friendships with the men she helps, Ruth works to find them housing and jobs, and then funeral homes willing to take their bodies - often in the middle of the night. She prepares and delivers meals to 'her guys,' supplementing her own income with discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets. She defies local pastors and the medical community to store rare medications for her most urgent patients, and teaches sex education to drag queens after hours at secret bars. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis, and in doing so becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of society. Ruth kept her story a secret for years, fearful of repercussions within her deeply conservative community. But at a time when it's more important than ever to stand up for those who can't, Ruth has found the courage to have her voice - and the voices of those who were stigmatised, rejected and abandoned - heard.

With the passing of Zane L. Miller in 2016, academia lost a renowned scholar and one of the key founders of new urban history-a branch of the discipline that placed urban life at the center of American history and treated the city as an arena for civic and political action. He was a devoted, tireless mentor who published or fostered dozens of books and articles on urban history. He also co-founded Temple University Press' foundational series Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy. Bringing the Civic Back In provides a critical overview, appreciation, and extension of Miller's work as scholar, editor, mentor, colleague, and citizen. Included are three excerpts from Miller's final, unfinished work, in which he presented cities as the source of a civic nationalism he viewed as fundamental to the development of American democracy. The editors-along with contributors Robert B. Fairbanks and Charles Lester-reflect on the life and work of their friend as well as his role in creating a Cincinnati school of urban history. These original essays by practitioners of Miller's approach highlight the power of ideas to shape social change.

As individuals incorporate new forms of media into their daily routines, these media transform individuals' engagement with networks of heterogeneous actors. Using the concept of media practices, this volume looks at processes of social and political transformation in diverse regions of the world to argue that media change and social change converge on a redefinition of the relations of individuals to larger collective bodies. To this end, contributors examine new collective actors emerging in the public arena through digital media or established actors adjusting to a diversified communication environment. The book offers an important contribution to a vibrant, transdisciplinary, and international field of research emerging at the intersections of communication, performance and social movement studies.

'A major analysis of our world's political crisis' - Joel Wainwright The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of 'the political' in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone. Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialisation and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country's military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolised the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class. Aasim Sajjad-Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification and atomisation, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the 'classless' subject.

In recent times where European welfare states are undergoing serious economic and social crises and being increasingly exposed to criticism, there has been a noticeable revival of feminist interest in the issues of equality. Focusing on a signature aspect of Scandinavian welfare states, Equality Struggles explores how gender equality and women's rights are transforming the relationship between Scandinavian states and social actors. Indeed, drawing on in-depth analyses from fieldwork in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, this book examines the largest and most established women's organizations and develops a multi-layered understanding of the entanglements between women's movements, neoliberal markets and state political agendas in Scandinavia, as they give rise to feminist fractions and new feminist coalitions. Contributing to novel understandings of "equality struggles" within women's organisations, this title will appeal to postgraduate students and scholars interested in fields such as Scandinavian Studies, Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations and Social Theory.

White supremacist groups are highly secretive, so their public propaganda tells us little about their operations or the people they attract. To understand the world of organized racism it is necessary to study it from the inside by talking to their members and observing their groups. Doing so reveals a disturbing picture of how fairly ordinary white people learn to embrace the vicious ideas and dangerous agendas of white supremacism. This book takes the reader inside organized racism, revealing the kind of women and men who join groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi skinheads, and what they do in those groups. The volume collects significant published works from renowned scholar Kathleen M. Blee's work on racist activism, alongside new essays on the theories, methods, and approaches of studying racist activism. Discussing topics such as emotional issues in research, the place of violence and hate in white supremacism, and how women are involved in racial terrorism, Blee makes use of a range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic observations, and interviews, to shape her findings. Written by the pioneer and leading scholar of women in racist activism, this volume is essential reading for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the areas of social movements, politics, race studies, and American history.

In Disobedience and Democracy, the inimitable leftist thinker Howard Zinn lays out a clear and dynamic case for civil disobedience and protest as legitimate vehicles for social change. Zinn challenges the dominant arguments against forms of protest that challenge the status quo. He solidifies his argument, exploring the politics of direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience and strikes, while also offering lessons for protestors of the present and future generations. This book is a passionate, humanist argument for group-led 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.

In 2019, climate activist Charlie Hertzog Young attempted suicide, following a succession of breakdowns. He jumped off a six-storey building, resulting in the loss of both legs. He spent a month in a coma, lost his flat and woke up without a job. In rebuilding his life physically and emotionally, Charlie saw that the climate crisis and mental illness are inextricably linked and, equally, little understood. In this reflective, wise and darkly humorous account of his own recovery, he explores how his bipolarity was largely driven by climate change and identifies the ways in which our culture has led to the current crisis. He shows how climate chaos is ubiquitous, unpredictable and mediated through vast inequalities of power; how climate disaster is responsible for many times more mental health conditions than physical ailments; how our minds aren't built to deal with such threats; and how modern society isn't fit to support those suffering as a result. Spinning Out is more than a call to arms - it's a manual for anyone who wants to fight for a better world and avoid the pitfalls of despair. It draws on the experience of dozens of activists, organisers and researchers across every habitable continent - from radical psychiatrists and youth organisers to co-operative builders in flooded Pakistan, activists in Nigeria and earth defenders in indigenous Mexico - to outline models for recovery and post-traumatic growth. It shows how meaningful action - action that aims to change not just our emissions but our entire way of life - can be a powerful means of both psychological recovery and planetary renewal. Climate-related mental health issues are crippling millions. Spinning Out points to a better way forward - towards wedding the needs of the earth with the needs of the human mind, towards new-found meaning, connection and belonging.

Tunisian women have received significant attention for their active participation in preserving and extending women's rights since 2011. However, their activism and latest achievements should be considered not a recent phenomenon but rather part and parcel of a distinctive local history that has included women as agents of change. This book examines Tunisian women's lived experiences, as individuals and as a group, within a sociohistorical framework that uncovers the enduring feminine footprint over centuries and eventually underpins and defines their most recent fight for gender equality in postrevolutionary Tunisia. The historic and current presentation of Tunisian women's public and civic engagement distinguishes between different types of women's objectives in order to examine women's activism holistically as it evolved in the local context. The Tunisian Women's Rights Movement will be of interest to students and scholars of Tunisia, North African, and Middle East Studies and gender in the Arab world.

'A major analysis of our world's political crisis' - Joel Wainwright The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of 'the political' in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone. Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialisation and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country's military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolised the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class. Aasim Sajjad-Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification and atomisation, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the 'classless' subject.

""Bending Over Backwards" is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."
--"The Minnesota Review"

a[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collectionas strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read.a
--American Journal of Occupational Therapy

"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. "Bending Over Backwards" remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship."
--"H-Net Reviews"

"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."
--"Novel"

"It is crucial, if at times uncomfortable, reading for medical professionals and scholars in the medical humanities alike. . . . Daring to mix the literary and the medical, the symbolic and the instrumental, the interpretive and the interventionist, Davis demonstrates what disability can teach us about the life that awaits any human baby."
--"Literature and Medicine"

"This superlative book is highly recommended for undergraduates, scholars, and researchers in the fields of disability studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethics, and cultural studies."--"Choice"

"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."
--Stanley Fish, in "Chicago Tribune"

aA collection of essays written over several years for different audiences, it contains fascinating traces of Davisas intellectual journey from novel theorist and Foucauldian to disability studeis scholar and memoirist.a--"American Literature"

With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.

Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics. Throughout, he maintains that disability is the prime category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body.

Bending Over Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko's meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditations are all about, opening up new vistas of thought and new modes of critique informed by epistemic breaks from "empirical absolutism" that reduce Biko to an epistemic catalogue. It is in Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness that the black subject is engaged not only in the politics of criticism for its own sake, but philosophy of existence.

This handbook covers social movement activities in Latin American countries that have had profound consequences on the political culture of the region. It examines the developments of the past twenty years, such as a renewed upswing in popular mobilization, the ending of violent conflicts and military governments, new struggles and a relatively more democratic climate. It shows that, from southern Chiapas to Argentina, social movements in the 1990s and especially in the 2000s, have reached new heights of popular participation. There is a lack of research on the politics of this region in the contemporary era of globalization, this volume partially fills the void and offers a rich resource to students, scholars and the general public in terms of understanding the politics of mass mobilization in the early twenty-first century. The contributors each address social movement activity in their own nation and together they present a multidisciplinary perspective on the topic. Each chapter uses a case study design to bring out the most prominent attributes of the particular social struggle(s), for instance the main protagonists in the campaigns, the grievances of the population and the outcomes of the struggles. This Handbook is divided into seven substantive themes, providing overall coherence to a broad range of social conflicts across countries, issues and social groups. These themes include: 1) theory of Latin American social movements; 2) neoliberalism; 3) indigenous struggles; 4) women's movements; 5) movements and the State; 6) environmental movements; and 7) transnational mobilizations.

Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, Palestinian youth movements have formed unofficial and leaderless networks of political activism, using the internet to mobilise and bring together three generations of Palestinian activists. This book focuses on three key case studies that have marked a turning point in the development of youth-organised and grassroots Palestinian politics: the 15 March movement in Gaza, the Palestinians for Dignity movement in the West Bank, and the Prawer movement of young Palestinians in Israel. Drawing on extensive fieldwork composed of interviews with leading Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaza and detailed analysis of social media patterns, this book offers a fresh reading of Palestinian youth and their central online and offline role in popular protests against both Israeli and Palestinian power structures.

Membership of political parties is diverse. Not everyone participates and those who do, do not participate in the same way. This book engages with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organisations and presents the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism. It is based on membership surveys which have been administered, gathered and collated by a group of prominent party scholars from across Europe, Canada and Israel. Utilizing this rich data source together with the insights of party scholars, the book investigates what party membership means in advanced industrial democracies. In doing so, it provides a clearer picture of who joins political parties, why they do it, the character of their political activism, how they engage with their parties, and what opinions they hold. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, particularly to those interested in representation, participation, political parties and elections.

The recent activism film Just Do It (2011) had a message: 'Get off your arse and change the world'. But, as Michael Norton here implores, no-one has to be that energetic. Click2Change advocates sitting back and changing the world from computers, iPads and iPhones. Click2Change offers a wide range of world-changing thing to do on the internet: such as becoming an e-activist or recycling unwanted stuff. With plenty of ideas, information and lots of websites to access, readers will be able to make their mark on the world with a click of the mouse.

Much has been written about the "extraordinary" violence of recent history, its brutality, and the impossibility of describing it. Routine Violence focuses on the violence of much more routine political practices-the drawing up of political categories and the writing of national histories. The book takes its material from the history of twentieth-century India: the land of Gandhi and of effective nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. It asks questions about how particular histories are claimed as the "real" histories of a nation; how the "sacred" nation, and its ("mainstream") culture and politics, come to be constructed; and how a certain inducement to violence, and a collective amnesia regarding that violence, follow from all of this. This is the first book to engage in a sustained investigation of the routine political violence of our times. No sales in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.