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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > General
Are artistic engagements evolving, or attracting more attention?
The range of artistic protest actions shows how the globalisation
of art is also the globalisation of art politics. Here, based on
multi-site field research, we follow artists from the MENA
countries, Latin America, and Africa along their committed
transnational trajectories, whether these are voluntary or the
result of exile. With this global and decentred approach, the
different repertoires of engagement appear, in all their
dimensions, including professional ones. In the face of political
disillusionment, these aesthetic interventions take on new
meanings, as artivists seek alternative modes of social
transformation and production of shared values. Contributors are:
Alice Aterianus-Owanga, Sebastien Boulay, Sarah Dornhof, Simon
Dubois, Shyam Iskander, Sabrina Melenotte, Franck Mermier, Rayane
Al Rammal, Kirsten Scheid, Pinar Selek, and Marion Slitine.
Peru is classified as one of the deadliest countries in the world
for environmental defenders, where activists face many forms of
violence. Through an ethnographic and systematic comparison of four
gold mining conflicts in Peru, Resisting Extractivism presents a
vivid account of subtle and routine forms of violence, analyzing
how meaning making practices render certain types of damage and
suffering noticeable while occluding others. The book thus builds a
ground-up theory of violence—how it is framed, how it impacts
people's lived experiences, and how it can be confronted. By
excavating how the everyday interactions that underlie conflicts
are discursively concealed and highlighted, this study assists in
the prevention and transformation of violence over resource
extraction in Latin America. The book draws on a controlled,
qualitative comparison of four case studies, extensive ethnographic
research conducted over fourteen months of fieldwork, analysis of
over 900 archives and documents, and unprecedented access to more
than 250 semi structured interviews with key actors across
industry, the state, civil society, and the media. Michael Wilson
Becerril identifies, traces, and compares these dynamics to explain
how similar cases can lead to contrasting outcomes-insights that
may be usefully applied in other contexts to save lives and build
better futures.
This book investigates the interplay between media, politics,
religion, and culture in shaping Arabs' quest for more stable and
democratic governance models in the aftermath of the "Arab Spring"
uprisings. It focuses on online mediated public debates,
specifically user comments on online Arab news sites, and their
potential to re-engage citizens in politics. Contributors
systematically explore and critique these online communities and
spaces in the context of the Arab uprisings, with case studies,
largely centered on Egypt, covering micro-bloggers, Islamic
discourse online, Libyan nationalism on Facebook, and a
computational assessment of online engagement, among other topics.
 Chicago is home to the second-largest Mexican immigrant
population in the United States, yet the activities of this
community have gone relatively unexamined by both the media and
academia. In this groundbreaking new book, Xóchitl Bada
takes us inside one of the most vital parts of Chicago’s Mexican
immigrant community—its many hometown associations. Hometown
associations (HTAs) consist of immigrants from the same town in
Mexico and often begin quite informally, as soccer clubs or prayer
groups. As Bada’s work shows, however, HTAs have become a
powerful force for change, advocating for Mexican immigrants in the
United States while also working to improve living conditions in
their communities of origin. Focusing on a group of HTAs founded by
immigrants from the state of Michoacán, the book shows how their
activism has bridged public and private spheres, mobilizing social
reforms in both inner-city Chicago and rural Mexico. Bringing
together ethnography, political theory, and archival research, Bada
excavates the surprisingly long history of Chicago’s HTAs, dating
back to the 1920s, then traces the emergence of new models of
community activism in the twenty-first century. Filled with vivid
observations and original interviews, Mexican Hometown Associations
in Chicagoacán gives voice to an underrepresented community and
sheds light on an underexplored form of global activism.
Since long before the age of celebrity activism, literary authors
have used their public profiles and cultural capital to draw
attention to a wide range of socio-political concerns. This book is
the first to explore – through history, criticism and creative
interventions – the relationship between authorship, political
activism and celebrity culture across historical periods, cultures,
literatures and media. It brings together scholars, industry
stakeholders and prominent writer-activists to engage in a
conversation on literary fame and public authority. These scholarly
essays, interviews, conversations and opinion pieces interrogate
the topos of the artist as prophet and acute critic of the
zeitgeist; analyse the ideological dimension of literary celebrity;
and highlight the fault lines between public and private authorial
selves, ‘pure’ art, political commitment and marketplace
imperatives. In case studies ranging from the 18th century to
present-day controversies, authors illuminate the complex
relationship between literature, politics, celebrity culture and
market activism, bringing together vivid current debates on the
function and responsibility of literature in increasingly fractured
societies.
Women Activists between War and Peace employs a comparative
approach in exploring women's political and social activism across
the European continent in the years that followed the First World
War. It brings together leading scholars in the field to discuss
the contribution of women's movements in, and individual female
activists from, Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Great
Britain, Hungary, Russia and the United States. The book contains
an introduction that helpfully outlines key concepts and broader,
European-wide issues and concerns, such as peace, democracy and the
role of the national and international in constructing the new,
post-war political order. It then proceeds to examine the nature of
women's activism through the prism of five pivotal topics: *
Suffrage and nationalism * Pacifism and internationalism *
Revolution and socialism * Journalism and print media * War and the
body A timeline and illustrations are also included in the book,
along with a useful guide to further reading. This is a vitally
important text for all students of women's history,
twentieth-century Europe and the legacy of the First World War.
In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the private lives of
migrantmen who participated in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), a
binationalagreement between the United States and Mexico that
allowed hundredsof thousands of Mexican workers to enter this
country on temporary workpermits. While this program and the issue
of temporary workers has longbeen politicized on both sides of the
border, Loza argues that the prevailingromanticized image of
braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforcehas
obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers
themselves.Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives-such
as their transnationalunion-organizing efforts, the sexual
economies of both hetero andqueer workers, and the ethno-racial
boundaries among Mexican indigenousbraceros-Loza reveals how these
men defied perceived political, sexual, andracial norms. Basing her
work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from theUnited
States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully
differentiatebetween the experiences of mestizo guest workers and
the many Mixtec,Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing
so, she captures themyriad ways these defiant workers responded to
the intense discriminationand exploitation of an unjust system that
still persists today.
Does the internet facilitate social and political change, or even
democratization, in the Middle East? Despite existing research on
this subject, there is still no consensus on the importance of
social media and online platforms, or on how we are to understand
their influence. This book provides empirical analysis of the
day-to-day use of online platforms by activists in Egypt and
Kuwait. The research evaluates the importance of online platforms
for effecting change and establishes a specific framework for doing
so. Egypt and Kuwait were chosen because, since the mid-2000s, they
have been the most prominent Arab countries in terms of online and
offline activism. In the context of Kuwait, Jon Nordenson examines
the oppositional youth groups who fought for a constitutional,
democratic monarchy in the emirate. In Egypt, focus surrounds the
groups and organizations working against sexual violence and sexual
harassment. Online Activism in the Middle East shows how and why
online platforms are used by activists and identifies the crucial
features of successful online campaigns. Egypt and Kuwait are
revealed to be authoritarian contexts but where the challenges and
possibilities faced by activists are quite different. The
comparative nature of this research therefore exposes the
context-specific usage of online platforms, separating this from
the more general features of online activism. Nordenson
demonstrates the power of online activism to create an essential
'counterpublic' that can challenge an authoritarian state and
enable excluded groups to fight in ways that are far more difficult
to suppress than a demonstration.
Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of
women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of
our current global political-environmental crisis and the
interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life
and human relationships. In a world, in which ""a woman's voice""
exists in bodies called in to occupy important positions in
corporations, government, cultural and academic institutions, to
work in factories, to join the army, but whose bodies are
systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the
double burden imposed on us to perform both productive and
reproductive labor, I ask what is the task of thought and form in
contemporary feminist situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible
Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the
current context of the production of redundant populations, the
omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation,
toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more. These
reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the
present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks,
Sarah Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Simpson, Chris
Kraus, AlaIde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day,
Veronica GonzAlez, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena
Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati
Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Paley, Raquel GutiErrez,
etc. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on
how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating
and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically
linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.
Recently, a wall was built in eastern Germany. Made of steel and
cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with
video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to
protect a prison or a military base, but rather to guard a
three-day meeting of the finance ministers of the Group of Eight
(G8). The wall manifested a level of security that is increasingly
commonplace at meetings regarding the global economy. The authors
of Shutting Down the Streets have directly observed and
participated in more than 20 mass actions against global in North
America and Europe, beginning with the watershed 1999 WTO meetings
in Seattle and including the 2007 G8 protests in Heiligendamm.
Shutting Down the Streets is the first book to conceptualize the
social control of dissent in the era of alterglobalization. Based
on direct observation of more than 20 global summits, the book
demonstrates that social control is not only global, but also
preemptive, and that it relegates dissent to the realm of
criminality. The charge is insurrection, but the accused have no
weapons. The authors document in detail how social control
forecloses the spaces through which social movements nurture the
development of dissent and effect disruptive challenges.
Uncovers the powerful effects of 20th-century Jewish women's social
and political activism on contemporary American life Winner of the
2013 National Jewish Book Award, Women's Studies Ballots, Babies,
and Banners of Peace explores the social and political activism of
American Jewish women from 1890 to the beginnings of World War II.
Written in an engaging style, the book demonstrates that no history
of the birth control, suffrage, or peace movements in the United
States is complete without analyzing the impact of Jewish women's
presence. The volume is based on years of extensive primary source
research in more than a dozen archives and among hundreds of
primary sources, many of which have previously never been seen.
Voluminous personal papers and institutional records paint a vivid
picture of a world in which both middle-class and working-class
American Jewish women were consistently and publicly engaged in all
the major issues of their day and worked closely with their
non-Jewish counterparts on behalf of activist causes. This
extraordinarily well-researched volume makes a unique contribution
to the study of modern women's history, modern Jewish history, and
the history of American social movements.
Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of
women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of
our current global political-environmental crisis and the
interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life
and human relationships. In a world, in which ""a woman's voice""
exists in bodies called in to occupy important positions in
corporations, government, cultural and academic institutions, to
work in factories, to join the army, but whose bodies are
systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the
double burden imposed on us to perform both productive and
reproductive labor, I ask what is the task of thought and form in
contemporary feminist situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible
Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the
current context of the production of redundant populations, the
omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation,
toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more. These
reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the
present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks,
Sarah Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Simpson, Chris
Kraus, AlaIde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day,
Veronica GonzAlez, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena
Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati
Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Paley, Raquel GutiErrez,
etc. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on
how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating
and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically
linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.
Born in 1917 in Bizana in the Eastern Cape, Oliver Reginald Tambo became Nelson Mandela's legal partner and a prominent member of the ANC's Youth League.
Following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Tambo left South Africa to set up the ANC's international mission. As President of the ANC in exile, he led the fight against apartheid on both the diplomatic and military fronts. He died in 1993 on the eve of liberation. Tambo had a profound influence on the ANC during the difficult years of uncertainty, loneliness and homesickness in exile. His simplicity, his nurturing style, his genuine respect for all people seemed to bring out the best in them.
This is the story of one of South Africa's great sons - 'the most loved leader', the Moses who led his people to the promised land but did not live to enter it.
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