Combining political theory with attention to political practice, this book explores the development of localism as a new mode of statecraft and its implications for the practice of citizenship. It looks at the development of community organising, neighbourhood planning and community councils that identify and nurture the energies, talents and creativity of the population to solve their own problems and improve our world.

Exploring Indigenous activism through the lens of media practices, this book examines the Indigenous media that has emerged in Argentina since the introduction of legislation in 2009 intended to promote diversity and access in radio and television media production. Francesca Belotti provides insights into the political and cultural matrix, attitudes of resistance and empowerment, and the outward and inward direction of Indigenous activism by unpacking the media practices that unfold in Indigenous radio and television stations in Argentina. The theoretical framework combines studies on indigeneity, social/decolonial movements and media practices, and draws on interviews conducted with Indigenous media practitioners from different Indigenous populations around Argentina. The book examines how media practices can help support and sustain Indigenous political and cultural activism and the process of identity self-ascription. It also addresses the complex negotiation between indigenizing media and assimilating the mainstream, as well as coping with other practical constraints. This book will be of interest both to students and scholars of Indigenous Studies, Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, Media Studies, and Social Movements, as well as media activists and practitioners globally.

As the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR)-which has operated since the early 1950s-was instrumental in the historic legislative breakthroughs of the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Lobby skillfully recounts the LCCR's professional and grassroots lobbying that contributed to these signature civil rights policy achievements in the 1950s and '60s. Shamira Gelbman explains how the diversity of this interest group coalition both hindered and enabled lobbyists to generate broad-based support for reforms that often seemed risky to legislators. They coordinated their efforts by identifying common ground among member organizations, developing coalitional positions on substantive and strategic questions, and exhorting organizations to mobilize professional and grassroots lobbying resources accordingly. The result was to "speak with one booming voice" to ultimately help secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Lobby concludes by reprising key lessons from the LCCR's organizational development and participation in civil rights policymaking. Gelbman suggests new directions for research on interest group coalitions and explores how the Leadership Conference's experience sheds light on the politics of the Second Reconstruction.

This book considers the radical effects the emergence of social media and digital politics have had on the way that advocacy organisations mobilise and organise citizens into political participation. It argues that these changes are due not only to technological advancement but are also underpinned by hybrid media systems, new political narratives, and a new networked generation of political actors. The author empirically analyses the emergence and consolidation within advanced democracies of online campaigning organisations, such as MoveOn, 38 Degrees, Getup and AVAAZ. Vromen shows that they have become leading political advocates, and influential on both national and international level governance. The book critically engages with this digital disruption of traditional patterns of political mobilisation and organisation, and highlights the challenges in embracing new ideas such as entrepreneurialism and issue-driven politics. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in political participation and citizen politics, interest groups, civil society organisations, e-government and politics and social media.

This book intertwines academic and activist voices to engage with more than three decades of lesbian activism in the Yugoslav space. The empirically rich contributions uncover a range of lesbian initiatives and the fundamental, but rarely acknowledged, role that lesbian alliances have played in articulating a feminist response to the upsurge of nationalism, widespread violence against women, and high levels of lesbophobia and homophobia in all of the post-Yugoslav states. By offering a distinctly intergenerational and transnational perspective, this collection does not only shed new light on a severely marginalised group of people, but constitutes a pioneering effort in accounting for the intricacies - solidarities, joys, and tensions - of lesbian activist organising in a post-conflict and post-socialist environment. With a plethora of authorial standpoints and innovative methodological approaches, the volume challenges the systematic absence of (post-)Yugoslav lesbian activist enterprises from recent social science scholarship. Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, history, politics, anthropology, and sociology.

International author gives an original perspective on the events of the twentieth century. Since she's finishing her own research, she's up to date on the most important arguments in the field, both of which give users an original look at the material. Goes beyond just reciting the events to talk about the deeper issue of human-animal relations, which is very big right now, and informs all of the animal rights courses out there. Points students in the direction of work they should read and people they should know, so is a good starting place for further research. Situates the Animal Rights Movement, which can seem like a fringe movement, within the broader sweep of American social movements in the twentieth century.

International author gives an original perspective on the events of the twentieth century. Since she's finishing her own research, she's up to date on the most important arguments in the field, both of which give users an original look at the material. Goes beyond just reciting the events to talk about the deeper issue of human-animal relations, which is very big right now, and informs all of the animal rights courses out there. Points students in the direction of work they should read and people they should know, so is a good starting place for further research. Situates the Animal Rights Movement, which can seem like a fringe movement, within the broader sweep of American social movements in the twentieth century.

Pollsters called it a foregone conclusion. Columnists said Theresa May's snap general election wouldn't just return her a thumping majority in the House of Commons - it would plunge the opposition into existential crisis. For Labour MPs, concerns about "job security" in an age of zero-hours contracts suddenly felt uncomfortably close to home. And then something happened. Momentum got to work. Grime4Corbyn gathered steam. Clicktivists were transformed into door-knocking, flag-waving activists. Soon, a familiar chant - "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" - was reverberating around football stadiums and venues across the country. All this while Theresa turned Maybot and the Conservatives released a manifesto that looked bad for people and even worse for animals. Featuring work by many of the UK's best-known cartoonists, including Martin Rowson, Steve Bell and Stephen Collins, The Corbyn Comic Book captures the qualities, quirks and flaws of a man whose startling rise to prominence has been the defining story of 2017. He didn't win, but he did cause a political earthquake. Corbynmania is a thing now - and so is Comix4Corbyn.

In her much anticipated memoir, Sisonke Msimang writes about her exile childhood in Zambia and Kenya, young adulthood and college years in North America, and returning to South Africa in the euphoric 1990s. She reflects candidly on her discontent and disappointment with present-day South Africa but also on her experiences of family, romance, and motherhood, with the novelist’s talent for character and pathos.

Militant young comrades dance off the pages of the 1970s Lusaka she invokes, and the heady and naive days of just-democratic South Africa in the 1990s are as vividly painted. Her memoir is at heart a chronicle of a coming-of-age, and while well-known South African political figures appear in these pages, it is an intimate story, a testament to family bonds and sisterhood.

Sisonke Msimang is one of the most assured and celebrated voices commenting on the South African present – often humorously; sometimes deeply movingly – and this book launches her to an even broader audience.

The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian milieu's public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible. Away from the intensity of the street-protests and the glare of mainstream media, however, its militants implement anarchist practices whose outcomes are less visible. They are feeding the hungry and poor, protecting migrants from fascist beatings and trying to carve out an autonomous political, social and cultural space. Activists within this movement share politics centred on hostility to the capitalist state and all forms of domination, hierarchy and discrimination. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork amongst Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians, Anarchy in Athens unravels the internal complexities within this milieu and provides a better understanding of the forces that give the space its shape. -- .

In 1964 Malcolm X was invited to debate at the Oxford Union Society at Oxford University. The topic of debate that evening was the infamous phrase from Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican Convention speech:"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." At a time when Malcolm was traveling widely and advocating on behalf of blacks in America and other nations, his thirty minute speech at the Oxford Union stands out as one of the great addresses of the civil rights era. Delivered just months before his assassination, the speech followed a period in which Malcolm had traveled throughout Africa and much of the Muslim world. The journey broadened his political thought to encompass decolonization, the revolutions underway in the developing world, and the relationship between American blacks and non-white populations across the globe-including England. Facing off against debaters in one of world's most elite institutions, he delivered a revolutionary message that tackled a staggering array of issues: the nature of national identity; US foreign policy in the developing world; racial politics at home; the experiences of black immigrants in England; and the nature of power in the contemporary world. It represents a moment when his thought had advanced to its furthest point, shedding the parochial concerns of previous years for an increasingly global and humanist approach to ushering in social change. Set to publish near the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Malcolm X at Oxford Union will reshape our understanding not only of the man himself, but world politics both then and now.

Populism has become a favorite catchword for mass media and politicians faced with the challenge of protest parties or movements. It has often been equated with radical right leaders or parties. This unique volume underlines that populism is an ambiguous but constitutive component of democratic systems torn between their ideology (government of the people, by the people, for the people) and their actual functioning.

Meaningful Resistance explores the origins and dynamics of resistance to markets through an examination of two social movements that emerged to voice and channel opposition to market reforms. Protests against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and rising corn prices in Mexico City, Mexico, offer a lens to analyze the mechanisms by which perceived, market-driven threats to material livelihood can prompt resistance. By exploring connections among marketization, local practices, and political protest, the book shows how the material and the ideational are inextricably linked in resistance to subsistence threats. When people perceive that markets have put subsistence at risk, material and symbolic worlds are both at stake; citizens take to the streets not only to defend their pocketbooks, but also their conceptions of community. The book advances contemporary scholarship by showing how attention to grievances in general, and subsistence resources in particular, can add explanatory leverage to analyses of contentious politics.

For the first time since the Neolithic, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.

Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.

Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.

Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

This book explores the commonalities between the struggles of the last years around the Mediterranean and tries to find the cultural roots of this season of protests and activism against repression and a growing systemic crisis. Who are their main characters? How has mobility of ideas and persons contributed to it? Why has the Mediterranean become the cradle of civil resistance? And how can one make sure that what has begun bears fruit? The author discusses how a strategic action of social movements and activists from both Europe and the Arab world can build the basis for a grassroots project for integration between the two shores, where mobility is at the core: on the one hand, mobility of ideas, activists, men and women of culture and other key-players, and trans-national strategizing; on the other hand, challenging the paradigms of visa policies and striving for a space of safe human mobility as one of the steps of a grassroots Mediterranean citizens project. Providing argument to a new theory of social mobilization, this book will be of interest to scholars of European and Arab politics as well as to political activists in the region.

As the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR)-which has operated since the early 1950s-was instrumental in the historic legislative breakthroughs of the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Lobby skillfully recounts the LCCR's professional and grassroots lobbying that contributed to these signature civil rights policy achievements in the 1950s and '60s. Shamira Gelbman explains how the diversity of this interest group coalition both hindered and enabled lobbyists to generate broad-based support for reforms that often seemed risky to legislators. They coordinated their efforts by identifying common ground among member organizations, developing coalitional positions on substantive and strategic questions, and exhorting organizations to mobilize professional and grassroots lobbying resources accordingly. The result was to "speak with one booming voice" to ultimately help secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Lobby concludes by reprising key lessons from the LCCR's organizational development and participation in civil rights policymaking. Gelbman suggests new directions for research on interest group coalitions and explores how the Leadership Conference's experience sheds light on the politics of the Second Reconstruction.

This book examines the phenomenon of athlete activism across all levels of sport, from elite and international sport, to collegiate and semi-pro, and asks what this tells us about the relationship between sport and wider society. With contributions from scholars around the world, the book presents a series of fascinating case studies, including the activism of world-famous athletes such as Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe and Raheem Sterling. Covering a broad range of sports, from the National Football League (NFL) and Australian Rules, to fencing and the Olympic Games, the book sheds important light on some of the most important themes in the study of sport, including gender, power, racism, intersectionality and the rise of digital media. It also considers the financial impact on athletes when they take a stand and the psychological impact of activism and how that might relate to sports performance. It has never been the case that 'sport and politics don't mix', and now, more than ever, the opposite is true. This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the politics or sociology of sport, the politics of protest, social movements or media studies.

'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.

Augusto Boal saw theatre as a mirror to the world, one that we can reach into to change our reality. This book, The Theatre of the Oppressed, is the foundation to 'Forum Theatre', a popular radical form practised across the world. Boal's techniques allowed the people to reclaim theatre, providing forums through which they could imagine and enact social and political change. Rejecting the Aristotelian ethic, which he believed allowed the State to remain unchallenged, he broke down the wall between actors and audience, the two sides coming together, the audience becoming the 'spect-actors'. Written in 1973, while in exile from the Brazilian government after the military coup-d'etat, this is a work of subversion and liberation, which shows that only the oppressed are able to free themselves.

Lessons from an Activist Intellectual provides examples of how an academician can combine the roles of teacher, researcher, and activist with a community-based critical pedagogy for democracy and empowerment. This book discusses the interconnections made between Jose Calderon's pedagogy and his history as an immigrant, student, social movement leader, researcher, professor, and community organizer. At the same time, it provides examples of an interactive, intercultural, and interdisciplinary pedagogy that involves both students and community participants as both teachers and learners in social change projects. This style of pedagogy has particular salience for historically excluded individuals from diverse racial, class, gender, and sexuality backgrounds, for whom the educational experience can be either an alienating or empowering experience.

The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate is a study of the ways in which various extremist groups have appropriated education for social manipulation in order to gain political power, and, in some cases, to incite violence. It is a detailed exploration of case studies representing both a wide range of situational differences (time, place, and political orientation) and experiential similarities. To examine a broad scope of circumstances, this book explores various types of rule (from National Socialism to communism to capitalism) from around the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America) and spans time periods from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the purpose of allowing these diverse situations to dialogue with one another, this study explores each country in its own right as well as in relation to others, ultimately demonstrating the extent to which they influenced one another.

This volume of Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change explores the relationships between mass media, social movements, and political change. Media plays an important role in social and political change and this volume advances scholarly understanding of how activists and elites alike use books, newspapers, and Internet-enabled technologies to affect change. Chapters include analyses of the role of media in the (Anti-)Abortion, Globalization, Labor, Townsend, and White Power movements as well as Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Section one is focused on the role of books in movements and on explaining differences in movement media coverage across diverse print outlets. The second and third sections engage contemporary debates involving print media by outlining how scholars might explain and/or expand the overall quality of media coverage that movements receive. Also exploring social movements' use of Internet-enabled technologies, and how the Internet expands the horizons of activism by facilitating activism outside of organizations and creating culture milieus that support movement participation. The final chapter then explores influences on the growth of the ex-gay movement across US states. Altogether, this volume suggests new avenues for research, provides new insights into the strategic use and influence of media, and challenges existing assumptions of media-movement relationships.

In a time of great gloom and doom internationally and of major global problems, this book offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of alternative societies that could be better for humans and the environment. Bringing together a wide range of approaches and new strands of economic and social thinking from across the US, Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Luke Martell critically assesses contemporary alternatives and shows the ways forward with a convincing argument of pluralist socialism. Presenting a much-needed introduction to the debate on alternatives to capitalism, this ambitious book is not about how things are, but how they can be!