Introduction -- Repression, ignorance, and undone science -- The epistemic dimension of the political opportunity structure -- The politics of meaning: from frames to design conflicts -- The organizational forms of counterpublic knowledge -- Institutional change, industrial transitions, and regime resistance politics -- Contemporary change: liberalization and epistemic modernization -- Conclusion.

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In _Movement and the Ordering of Freedom_, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the (...) lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions. (shrink)

Latin America is one of the most unequal continents in the world. This inequality translates into marked limitations in the possibilities of having a decent life for a high percentage of the population. Within the groups that are affected, women are undoubtedly even more so, because, in addition to shared economic and social inequalities with other vulnerable groups, they face discrimination based on gender. In Latin America, political protest has been undertaken by women who wish to denounce and abate the (...) injustices of which they are victims. These struggles have been analyzed by different thinkers. For the most part, feminist theories deal with the struggle of women against the oppressive behavior of patriarchy from the State or society. Others highlight the ability of women to contribute to social changes from socially accepted roles such as mothers, daughters, wives. These approaches ignore the difficulties experienced by female activists within the political mobilization. In this essay then we seek to document, analyze, and theorize about the patriarchal practices suffered by women activists - qua women- within the social organizations in Ciudad Juárez, as well as the forms of resistance they have opposed. (shrink)

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, (...) the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. -/- Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis. (shrink)

This article presents a critical phenomenology of embodiment in radical democratic struggles, focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests. It contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler, with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Arendt) and competence (Merleau-Ponty). Attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution of (...) social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens' movement among others and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement. (shrink)

Contemporary protest movements are skeptical of mainstream media outlets, and so to communicate, they make extensive use of social media such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. Most research to date has considered how protest movements, as preexistent entities, use such social media to communicate with stakeholders, but little, if any research, has considered how a protest movement is constituted in and through communication. Using the Montreal School’s ventriloquial approach to communication and using YouTube video footage of the gilets jaunes (...) – a contemporary French protest movement – in action, the purpose of this article is to explicate how a protest movement that resists the state’s authority is constituted in and through a textual artifact. Findings indicate that the protest movement is not only discursively constructed through the commentary that accompanies the video, but it is also constituted by non-human actants such as space, buildings and clothing. The protest movement mobilizes networks of human and non-human actants that invoke a moral authority that resists legally authorized state-sponsored networks which are also made up of human and non-human actants. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how bordered reality is being imposed and resisted in the context of where we are placed right now, 'Greece'. Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We approach this process methodologically (...) from the situated angle of the embodiment of resistance in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers ourselves), whose narratives reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the 'hotspot regime', which becomes a traveling control device. Rather than approaching the hotspots on the five Greek border islands as geographically fixed entities we introduce the concept of the mobile hotspot to show how the logic of the hotspot suffuses the uneven geographies of a bordered reality. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots. (shrink)

Political philosophers’ prescriptions for poverty alleviation have overlooked the importance of social movements led by, and for, the poor in the global South. I argue that these movements are normatively and politically significant for poverty reduction strategies and global justice generally. While often excluded from formal political processes, organized poor communities nonetheless lay the groundwork for more radical, pro-poor forms of change through their grassroots resistance and organizing. Poor-led social movements politicize poverty by insisting that, fundamentally, it is caused (...) by social relations of power that exploit and subordinate poor populations. These movements and their organizations also develop the collective capabilities of poor communities in ways that help them to contest the structures and processes that perpetuate their needs deprivation. I illustrate these contributions through a discussion of the Landless Rural Worker’s Movement in Brazil, a poor mobilization organization in Bangladesh, and the slum and pavement dweller movement in India. Global justice theorizing about poverty cannot just “add on” the contributions of such struggles to existing analyses of, and remedies for, poverty, however; rather, we will need to shift to a relational approach to poverty in order to see the vital importance of organized poor communities to transformative, poor-centered poverty reduction. (shrink)

The Movimiento Autonomo de Mujeres in Nicaragua - birthed in part from the Sandinista Revolution of the 1980s - represents one of the largest, most diverse, and most autonomous women's movements in all of Latin America. While it's true that scholars across a wide range of disciplines have written invariably about this social movement what remains missing from this body of work is scholarship aimed at understanding, specifically, the psychology of resistance; in other words, what are the psychological (...) mechanisms and methodologies that emerge from the margins that determine the kind of social action that revolutionizes societies? Investigating the psychosocial processes behind resistance is critical to understanding a commitment to justice and the development of subjectivity necessary for enacting the political activity required for social transformation. Psychology, in particular, as author Shelly Grabe argues, is positioned to engage in a systematic exploration of the links between social and political conditions that determine how, why, and under what circumstances resistance emerges. Narrating a Psychology of Resistance documents the first-hand accounts of the Nicaraguan women's Movimiento: a coordinated mobilization of women that has weathered unremitting power differentials characterized by patriarchy and capitalism. In this collection of testimonios, Grabe gives voice to these extraordinary women and closely examines how psychological processes that emerge in response to sociopolitical oppression can lead to gendered justice and the revolutionizing of societies at large. ". (shrink)

Inspired by a Danez Smith poem, this essay is a ‘little prayer’ for LGBTQIA+ people and organizers to be able to collectively grieve the family and friends they have lost, the relations they had to end, the social privileges they never had, or lost before and after sharing their queerness. It argues for the militant force of this slow-paced, ghostly, and ambiguous grief in queer lives, and in the LGBTQIA+ movements in Turkey and elsewhere. The author draws on 4 years (...) of organizing at Boysan’s House – a living memory space, and community hub in Istanbul – and the 12-hour oral history conducted with Mother Sema, who has been mobilizing her motherhood and her grief as a pro-LGBTQIA+ organizer since 2006. The essay suggests that ambiguous grief can be relearned and re-membered as a radically transformative force that is already constitutive of queer communities. It situates the histories and presents of Mother Sema and Boysan’s House amid diverse experiences of resilience and resistance through motherhood, queer kin making, and mourning. In so doing, the essay builds on the militant activisms of the Saturday Mothers/people, the Peace Mothers, the organized family members of LGBTQIA+ people, and the trans communities in Turkey. It is thus an inquiry into ways of housing and transforming ambiguous grief in the LGBTQIA+ movement, in the post-July 2016 coup attempt Turkey. (shrink)

Article seeks to explain the resistance to China's agricultural collectivization movement in the relative lack of experience with the Soviet Union, by contrast, the collectivization of agriculture far encountered great social resistance. This analysis of five factors: the impact of land reform; innovative class system; social control system; the party's primary structure; legalization of words. Analysis of these factors in rural China, "climax" is an organization's success: the organizers are dense, united and effective, is scattered by the (...) organizers, subordination and standstill in space, by pointing to the success of the history of mass mobilization experience and symbolic words, both of which link up well. This paper tries to explain the relative lack of resistance during China's agricultural collectivization campaign, in contrast to the Soviet Union experience in which agricultural collectivization encountered much heavier social resistance. Five factors are analysed: the effects of the Land Reform; the innovative class system; the social control system; th basic-level Party apparatus; the legitimizing discourse. Analyses of these factors reveal that the High Tide in rural China was an organizational success: the organizers were dense, cohesive and efficient, the organized were divided, dependent and spatially paralysed, and the two were well connected through historical experiences and symbolic discourse, all of which point to the success of mass mobilization. (shrink)

"Atom," "byte" and "gene" are metonymies for techno-scientific developments of the 20th century: nuclear power, computing and genetic engineering. Resistance continues to challenge these developments in public opinion. This book traces historical debates over atoms, bytes and genes which raised controversy with consequences, and argues that public opinion is a factor of the development of modern techno-science. The level and scope of public controversy is an index of resistance, examined here with a "pain analogy" which shows that just (...) as pain impacts movement, resistance impacts techno-scientific mobilization: it signals that something is wrong, and this requires attention, elaboration and a response to the challenge. This analysis shows how different fields of enquiry deal with the resistance of social-psychological mentalities in the face of industrial, scientific and political activities inspired by projected futures. (shrink)

Until very recently, civil disobedience, being a deliberate infraction of the law which is politically or morally motivated, was logically interpreted by theorists as a practice rooted in the state, since the source of positive law was primarily the State. But in the context of today’s globalization, the diversification of sources of power, the emergence of international laws or rules, or simply the obsoleteness of viewing the government as a juridical model, lead one to question the relevance of resorting to (...) civil disobedience. Indeed, its strategic minimalism, which consists of non-cooperation, passive resistance or non-violence, in addition to its relative acceptance of the State and the legal framework of its discourse, seem to make civil disobedience unable to face the “global challenge” that any emancipatory movement has to confront if it wants to be efficient. This paper thus proposes a new conception of civil disobedience inspired by Nancy Fraser’s theory of “abnormal justice”, so as to take into account the transversal nature of social contestation. (shrink)

This article discusses critical comparisons between the human and nonhuman abolitionist movements in the United States. The modern nonhuman abolitionist movement is, in some ways, an extension of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ongoing human Civil Rights movement. As such, there is considerable overlap between the two movements, specifically in the need to simultaneously address property status and oppressive ideology. Despite intentional appropriation of terminology and numerous similarities in mobilization efforts, (...) there has been disappointingly little academic discussion on this relationship. There are significant contentions regarding mobilization and goal attainment in the human abolitionist movement that speak to modern collective action on behalf of other animals. This article will explore the human abolitionist movement and discuss possible applications of movement organization, tactical repertoires, and goal attainment to the current nonhuman animal rights movement. Specifically, the utility of violence and legislative activism in the antislavery movement are discussed as potentially problematic approaches to abolishing nonhuman animal exploitation. Alternatively, the nonhuman animal rights focus on consumer resistance and nonviolence represent an important divergence in abolitionist mobilization. (shrink)

The past decade has seen major movements and mobilizations against the new crop of bilateral free trade and investment agreements being pursued by governments in the wake of the failure of global (World Trade Organization) and regional (e.g. Free Trade Area of the Americas) negotiations, and the defeat of an attempted Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the 1990s. However, in spite of much scholarly, non-governmental organization (NGO) and activist focus on transnational global justice activism, many of these movements, such as (...) the major multi-sectoral popular struggle over the recently-concluded US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, are hardly acknowledged in North America and Europe. With a shift in emphasis pushing liberalization and deregulation of trade and investment increasingly favouring lower-profile bilateral agreements, this article maps the resistance movements to these latest shifts in global free market capitalist relations and discusses the disconnect between these (mainly Southern) struggles and dominant scholarly and NGO conceptions of global justice and the global justice movement as well as questions of knowledge production arising from these movements. (shrink)

У статті розглянута й проаналізована протидія ОУН та УПА мобілізації в Червону армію чоловічого населення західноукраїнського регіону в 1944-1945 рр. Встановлено, що для перешкоджання призову підпілля та повстанці провели антимобілізаційну агітаційну кампанію, яка включала в себе випуск та поширення відповідних листівок, проведення зібрань із антимобілізаційними закликами та поширення чуток. Також повстанці чинили опір призову збройним шляхом, здійснюючи напади на причетних до призову осіб, на колони мобілізованих та військові комісаріати. Зрештою, підпілля вдалось і до застосування сили проти військовозобов'язаних та їхніх родичів. (...) Для протидії призову повстанці також поповнювали свої лави новобранцями. (shrink)

The material life of the vast majority of Chinese peasants is at a much higher level than during the totalitarian period of Mao’s rule. Despite corruption and social polarization, there is no chance that a large-scale famine will take place. Why is it that during the Maoist period, when tens of millions of peasants starved to death, we did not see any large-scale resistance movements, whereas today, during this relatively prosperous time, large-scale spontaneous resistance movements rise nearly ceaselessly? (...) The main factor behind the emergence of resistance from the grassroots is the people’s growing awareness of their rights and economic interests, and in the diversification of ideas and values. Behind economic interests lies the people’s hunger for rights. Thus, the question of how to provide a political space to the mobilization of the grassroots, how to guide the new civil rights movement towards a nonviolent and legal form of expression; how to limit the negative developments caused by the reform through political reform, protect society’s rights and constrain officials’ rights in order to establish a political system that respects human rights—these are the challenges confronting the Chinese Communist regime if it wants to appease the wrath of the people. (shrink)

The article addresses Europeanization of social movements in the context of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Europeanization occurs when movements collaborate, or make horizontal communicative linkages with movements in other countries, contest authorities beyond the state, frame issues as European and claim a European identity. The article presents a theoretical framework and research design for measuring the degree of social movement Europeanization followed by results of a pilot study on mobilization in Spain and Greece during 2011. While many (...) contentious action events studied only encompassed the domestic arena, the pilot study showed a relatively high degree of Europeanization in the Greek case, suggesting the viability of future research.El presente artículo aborda la europeización de los movimientos sociales en el contexto de la crisis de la deuda soberana europea. La europeización se produce cuando los movimientos colaboran, o establecen vínculos horizontales, con movimientos de otros países, contestan a las autoridades más allá de los límites del Estado-nación, identifican cuestiones como europeos y reclaman una identidad europea. El artículo presenta un marco teórico y un diseño investigación para medir el grado de europeización de los movimientos sociales seguido por los resultados de un estudio piloto de la movilización en España y Grecia durante el año 2011. Mientras que muchas de las acciones de protesta estudiadas solamente apelaban al ámbito doméstico, el estudio piloto muestra un relativamente alto grado de europeización en el caso griego, lo que sugiere la viabilidad de futuras investigaciones. (shrink)

Marcus Perperna Veiento, proscribed in 82 BC while he was praetor in Sicily, represents a very interesting case of mobility. The proscription, a much more severe measure than exile, forced Perperna to a complex series of travels through the Western Mediterranean. His movements were aimed at organizing a resistance and, if possible, concerted military action against the Sullan and post-Sullan regimes in Rome, also by joining Lepidus’ and Sertorius’ revolts. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct in detail (...) Perperna’s itinerary in order to appreciate the peculiar features of his movements in light of his “forced migration”. (shrink)

Today the movement of ideas, capital and people is faster and wilder than at any point in history. Globalization has made the world more interconnected. The flows of traffic in this new network have not only accelerated to new levels, but the directions of movement have multiplied and abandoned the well-worn paths. The cultural dynamics of globalization have presented new challenges to the existing models for explaining the forms of belonging and the patterns of exchange that are occurring (...) in the world. Culture is no longer understood as the discrete and unique expression of activities and ideas that occur in particular places. No culture can exist in isolation. The process of hybridization in the deterritorialization of cultures and peoples demands new theories of flow and resistance and is compelling artists and intellectuals to rethink their methods. Cultural critics and curators are also in need of new conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a new vocabulary in art discourse that is able to make sense of the complex forms of representation that are incorporating images from different locations and that simultaneously activate signs that contain within them a multiplicity of other signs, each embodying a series of contrary or competing codes. To do justice to both the complexity of the artwork and the intellectual potential of these new conceptual headings we need to develop frameworks that can address both these signs of difference and the process by which signs are made out of the plays with difference. The concept of translation can serve as a tool that can both make sense of the broader dynamic of cultural exchange and explain specific forms of cultural representation. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which contemporary artists and art writing deal with issues of mobility and attachment. What sort of place does art connote if it is constantly evoking the shuttling between places? In what language can the artist articulate the recognition that translations fail as often as they succeed? How does a bi-lingual or a bi-cultural person speak their mother-tongue and see the world, which operates in a different or hybrid language? These questions push the available conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural exchanges to the limits. In this article I re-examine the conceptual viability of the term hybridity in light of the new debates on creolization and globalization. (shrink)

This article compares the social movement mobilization that led to reforms in police and judicial handling of battering in the United States to the movement ideology, organization, and tactics that resulted in analogous policy reform in the processing of dowry burnings and beatings in India. Using field notes and secondary sources from both countries, the article examines how both movements redefined violence against women in families as a public issue, then looks at how movement demands affected (...) policy reform in each country. The analysis questions the current conceptualization of social movement success. Social movements theory assumes that entry into the polity of liberal, democratic states constitutes success in the sense of social change. Yet the cases analyzed suggest that assumptions about the gender neutrality of state response to movements prevents researchers from critically examining the outcomes of social movement mobilization. Moreover, institutionalization of women's movement demands and organization may diminish the capacity of such movements to control the social construction of domestic violence against women by providing protection without empowerment. (shrink)

This paper proposes a framework for understanding and analysing online social resistance movements based on Hilde Lindemann’s concept of counterstories (Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, 2003). This framework is based on the premise that we shape our identities in shared social spaces, and that such shared spaces are structured according to so-called ‘master narratives’. Master narratives define the ‘realm of possible identities’ that we can assume, and form the basis for either recognizing or denying recognition to various social groups in (...) specific roles that they might occupy. Social oppression occurs when master narratives preclude or forbid a certain form of self-expression, or alternatively force members of a specific social group into a determinate societal role (say, women who receive recognition only in the roles of mother or housewife). Counterstories serve as a corrective to these aspects of oppression by challenging the oppressive facets of master narratives. Based on this framework, I propose an interpretation of the #MeToo movement as a counterstory that aims to change the oppressive aspects of the patriarchal master narrative that (partially) structures many shared social spaces in the modern Western world. I end this paper by applying the framework to consider potential obstacles #MeToo may encounter as a distinctively online movement. (shrink)

The expropriation of marginalized women’s labor is a key issue in business ethics in these times of global outsourcing and informal work arrangements. This has led to a transnational advocacy movement for securing the labor rights of homeworkers, who are poor women working on piece-rate contracts out of their homes. Drawing on materialist feminism, our paper critically explores the homeworker network in Pakistan, that was set up as part of a global push by international institutions and networks to localize (...) the issue across geographies. Our focus is the national women’s NGO that leads advocacy efforts on the issue in the country and its relationship with other actors. Through fieldwork spanning 3 years we find that the network employs a top-down ‘us versus them’ approach in advocacy and mobilization. The race-to-the-bottom between the network’s national and district-level actors for donor funding further undermines prospects for developing indigenous narratives of resistance. The network, while mission bound to enhance the collective agency of its constituency, has depoliticized what should have been a class-based feminist struggle. From a materialist perspective, we conclude that the NGOized network rests upon and feeds off of its constituency, creating an additional layer of primitive accumulation over the workers it represents. (shrink)

In his 1963 response to an open letter from eight white religious leaders chastising his involvement in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. explained that civil rights activists’ blatant breaking of some laws while obeying others was the result of two types of laws: just laws and unjust laws. Civil rights activists believed they had a legal responsibility to obey just laws and a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Today, new civil rights struggles continue to challenge unjust laws that shred (...) the fabric of democracy that America espouses. Drawing upon both the Civil Rights Movement and the contemporary Movement for Black Lives, this article argues that unjust laws and practices must be broken and challenged before a just society is established. It identifies four ethical strategies for social activism: collective work and responsibility, strategic timing and economic disconnection, political mobilization, and faithful perseverance. (shrink)

Effective Altruism is a popular social movement that encourages individuals to donate to organizations that effectively address humanity’s most severe poverty. However, because Effective Altruists are committed to doing the most good in the most effective ways, they often argue that it is wrong to help those nearest to you. In this paper, I target a major subset of Effective Altruists who consider it a moral obligation to do the most good possible. Call these Obligation-Oriented Effective Altruists (OOEAs), and (...) their movement Obligation-Oriented Effective Altruism (OOEA). I argue that insofar as this variety of OOEA seems to commit us to refrain from helping the people right in front of us, there is something intuitively wrong about it. In response, I introduce an alternative model that embraces partiality: Mutual Aid. Mutual Aid is a network of community members, usually from the same geographical region, who share a commitment to offer, receive, and exchange material goods, wealth, and social support. I recommend Mutual Aid as a liberatory model, which—through empathy, solidarity, and care—mobilizes community building and provides a catalyst for community advocacy. As such, we should resist the claims of OOEAs that partially distributing our funds to people or causes we care about is morally wrong or even less than ideal. We do not have a moral obligation to use our funds “effectively;” rather, we have a broader obligation to address human suffering, and Mutual Aid is one moral alternative for discharging this duty. (shrink)

Innovative organizing strategies in the labor movement are being driven by the realization that labor law is of virtually no help in helping workers exercise their rights. Unions are increasingly designing strategies that go beyond traditional workplace tactics and draw on a wide range of social actors and relationships in an effort to find and harness new leverage sources. Service Employees International Union Local 1199 Florida provides one such example. 1199 Florida has a multilayered, multifaceted organizing strategy that attempts (...) to surmount the obstacles of employer resistance and weak labor laws by mobilizing a range of allies and engaging political and regulatory actors. (shrink)

This article examines the strategic politics of an Indigenous network called las Mujeres Amazónicas (the Amazonian Women) that is resisting the expansion of extractive projects in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. It asks, what are the Mujeres Amazónicas’ political strategies to resist extractive occupation and how do they develop and deploy these strategies in their territorial struggle? To answer this question, I analyze how their organizing is characterized by a political design that merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, (...) protest marches, and other public actions – with communitarian practices that reproduce human and more-than-human life in the Amazon. To illustrate this strategic fusion, the article turns to an image that the Kichwa leader Elvia Dagua wove into an artesanía (handicraft) called la Araña Tejedora (the Weaving Spider). By analyzing Dagua’s artesanía and other self-descriptions of the Mujeres Amazónicas, the article shows how practices of communitarian reproduction are used and transformed by the Amazonian Women, thus enabling their political work and sustaining their lives at the same time. The strategic deployment of reproductive practices reveals how Indigenous women’s cultural and social identities are neither static nor unchangeable. It also illustrates that the Mujeres Amazónicas’ organizing should not be interpreted as a simple example of local politics responding to extractive occupation. By contrast, the article shows how the Mujeres Amazónicas are historical and political subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital, and to build global connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living. (shrink)

I examine the risks and opportunities associated with social movement coalition building in attempts to block or curtail the rise of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in the United States. As producers have scaled up animal production facilities, environmentalists and animal rights activists, along with numerous other social actors, have begun anti-CAFO campaigns. I argue that while the CAFO has mobilized a diverse group of social actors, these individuals and organizations do not all have the same interests (aside from (...) resistance to CAFOs), leading to some unlikely allies. These odd alliances provide opportunities for agrifood scholars to study the relationship between the coalitions that social movement organizations form and the support they receive from their respective constituencies. Lastly, I argue that the need for agrifood scholars to address the pitfalls associated with single-issue coalition building extends beyond the unlikely alliance between environmentalists and animal rights activists, as agrifood related crises have led to a proliferation of such coalitions. (shrink)

While suicide occurs in numbers across countries, it has rarely been used as a form of collective action. In South Korea, however, a total of 107 protesters died from the act of committing suicide, most notably by means of self-immolation, in protest against injustice in the country. While they are regarded as political "martyrs," it remains unclear why they committed suicide and what they wanted to achieve with this highly unusual and costly form of protest. The paper addresses this largely (...) neglected issue by examining the suicide notes left by 48 Korean suicide protesters. The findings reveal that at least in Korea suicide protest was used not only as a from of protest and resistance, but also as an unusual form of micromobilization of mobilizing "consensus" and "action" among halfhearted activists and apathetic bystanders, by accusing the political and economic system as unjust and illegitimate, by identifying the apathy and inaction of the people as the main culprit for persistent injustice, and by urging and shaming the target audience to join a movement. The model presented here of suicide protest as a form of micromobilization provides a useful conceptual framework with which to compare seemingly diverse incidents of suicide protest across countries. (shrink)

BRISKIN L. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 285–296 Resistance, mobilization and militancy: nurses on strikeDrawing on nurses’ strikes in many countries, this paper explores nurse militancy with reference to professionalism and the commitment to service; patriarchal practices and gendered subordination; and proletarianization and the confrontation with healthcare restructuring. These deeply entangled trajectories have had a significant impact on the work, consciousness and militancy of nurses and have shaped occupation‐specific forms of resistance. They have produced a pattern of overlapping (...) solidarities – occupational solidarity, gendered alliances and coalitions around healthcare restructuring – which have supported, indeed promoted, militancy among nurses, despite the multiple forces arrayed against them. The professional commitments of nurses to the provision of care have confronted healthcare restructuring, nursing shortages, intensification of work, precarious employment and gendered hierarchies with a militant discourse around the public interest, and a reconstitution and reclamation of ‘caring’, what I call the politicisation of caring. In fact, nurses’ dedication to caring work in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries may encourage rather than dissuade them from going on strike. This paper uses a trans‐disciplinary methodology, qualitative material in the form of strike narratives constructed from newspaper archives, and references to the popular and scholarly literature on nursing militancy. (shrink)

Industrial growth and environmental protection have been in perpetual conflict. Reform environmental movements have attempted to address some of the worst abuses of nature by demanding government intervention to restrain pollution. Also, these reform movements have cooperated with corporate elites to obtain some controls on pollution. The 104th Congress attempted to destroy even weak pollution controls. New efforts to mobilize resistance are occurring. The deep, long-range ecology movement inspires resistance by affirming the joy of human participation in (...) nature. (shrink)

This paper examines the reasons why peasant migrants in Chinese cities, a long exploited but silent working class, recently started to voice out claims for better protection of their legal rights. As legal consciousness develops among migrant workers, who slowly learn how to mobilize the law in an effort to resist an oppressive system, so does the awareness of the regime's failings and of the need for alternative forms of representation. However, the migrants' attempts to achieve more autonomy have so (...) far been hijacked by the Party_state and hardly give rise to society empowerment. mobilization of the grassroots, how to guide the new civil rights movement towards a nonviolent and legal form of expression; how to limit the negative developments caused by the reform through political reform, protect society’s rights and constrain officials’ rights in order to establish a political system that respects human rights—these are the challenges confronting the Chinese Communist regime if it wants to appease the wrath of the people. (shrink)

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more (...) usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the Irish dancing body by combining the growing social science interest in mobility with the established area of the body as a site of culture. On the basis of ethnographic observations and interviews about dance and culture in Ireland, I will discuss the Irish dancing body in relation to the construction of social memory, the embodiment of values linked to Irish national identity, mobility, dance competitions and global touring. First, I will detail (...) three distinct movement sequences from different dance forms in Ireland: competitive Irish dancing, dance theatre and Riverdance(the commercial Irish dance show). Second, I will look at how dance can be said to travel around Ireland, north and south, as well as back and forth to Ireland. The idea of the Irish dancing body offers an example of the unity of body and mind in dance, revealing also that abstract dance and movement communicate stories about their societies. In Irish dance, these stories feature displacement, longing and resistance, often steeped in the history. I conclude that this social memory connects a distinct Irish tradition with European modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Narratives and the Meaning of NationalismLloyd KramerThe vast, expanding literature on nationalism may well defy every generalization except a familiar, general theme of intellectual history: texts about nationalism have always drawn their perspectives and passions from the evolving political and cultural contexts in which their authors have lived. Modern accounts of nationalism show the unmistakable traces of political, military, and cultural conflicts in every decade of the twentieth (...) century—from the era of nationalist rivalries before World War I to the redefinitions of gender, literature, and history that have emerged in contemporary postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism.This connection between the texts of nationalist scholarship and the modern contexts of politics and culture suggests why historical narratives of nationalism have become part of the history of nationalism itself. Nationalism’s scholarly interpreters cannot easily separate themselves from the objects of their analysis, and their interpretations are often as diverse and fragmented as the nations they describe. This essay enters the debate on nationalism, describes recurring themes in the historical literature, and replicates a key characteristic of the historiography by stressing that the complexity of nationalism and its interpreters resists every simplifying, comprehensive definition. Histories of nationalism provide a striking example of how the history of ideas never reaches a point of uncontested closure and never finally escapes the political and cultural contexts in which all historical narratives are produced.Like most analysts of nationalism, I assume that it is one of the decisive forces in modern history and that its significance demands careful, critical analysis. It also calls for always incomplete definitions, one of which can be drawn from the German historian Peter Alter. Nationalism is “both an ideology and a political movement which holds the nation and sovereign nation-state to be crucial indwelling values, and which manages to mobilize the political will of [End Page 525] a people or a large section of the population.”1 Nationalist ideas are thus a distinctive form of modern thought that shapes the political actions and cultural identities of individuals as well as groups. The meanings of nationalism and national identity typically depend on various dichotomies that define the nation in terms of its differences from other places or people—the dynamic process of identity formation that has received wide attention in contemporary cultural studies. My own view of the “oppositional” structures in nationalist thinking coincides with the concise description by Peter Sahlins: “National Identity is a socially constructed and continuous process of defining ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.... National identities... do not depend on the existence of any objective linguistic or cultural differentiation but on the subjective experience of difference.”2 Sahlins thus assumes that something called national identity is “there,” but he also insists that national consciousness is a “constructed” identity. Nationalism, in short, does not express or reflect a natural, primordial reality.The assumption that nationalisms are historical rather than natural phenomena shapes most of the scholarly literature, so that the study of nationalism leads to historical analysis rather than to biology or physical geography. Although there have been countless historical studies of nationalism in different periods, cultures, and conflicts,3 my discussion will refer to a small number of narratives that have made especially significant theoretical claims about the nature of nationalism. There is of course no way to analyze such theories without exclusions and generalizations, which I shall provide by focusing mostly on works about Europe and dividing the patterns of historical analysis into the following broad categories: (1) the description of nationalism as a central component of modernization, reflecting and also shaping intellectual, cultural, economic, social, and political transitions from premodern to modern history; (2) the claim that nationalisms are modern religious movements, related to but also displacing earlier religions; (3) the argument that nationalism is a linguistic, literary construction that depends on new forms of communication, intellectuals, and narratives; (4) the description of nationalism as a discourse of gender and ethnicity that shapes individual identities and also expresses anxieties about sexuality, culture, and respectability; and (5) the argument that nationalisms can be divided into categories (good/bad, Western/Eastern, [End Page 526] political/cultural) and phases that represent sharp differences in the development of modern... (shrink)

This paper draws from the work of Michel Foucault to understand how the user/survivor movement exists within the context of a political mental health services apparatus. Such an analysis puts power at the center of mental health, and highlights the way in which specific relations of power—between the psychiatrist and patient,1 for example—work to produce discourse, which in turn works to reproduce these same relations of power. The first section of the paper briefly discusses how, for Foucault, psychiatry is (...) a self-perpetuating apparatus, built around the power of the psychiatrist to define what constitutes valid knowledge. This theoretical framework makes clear that, within the apparatus, there will be alternative... (shrink)

There has been an outpouring of research on right-wing populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and right-wing movements in Europe. Yet, little research has been devoted to divisions among conservatives themselves, especially among conservative academics. Although Trump has maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he has fostered sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. This article compares 102 politically conservative professors who are Trumpists and 80 conservative professors who are anti-Trumpists. All 182 function (...) as public intellectuals who advocate their views in print and digital media. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this article proposes a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect positions in the academic field to affiliations with think tanks, government agencies, and professional associations in the field of power that reinforce their respective political identities. This research contributes to political sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and the sociology of conservative politics in American higher education. (shrink)

Industrial growth and environmental protection have been in perpetual conflict. Reform environmental movements have attempted to address some of the worst abuses of nature by demanding government intervention to restrain pollution. Also, these reform movements have cooperated with corporate elites to obtain some controls on pollution. The 104th Congress attempted to destroy even weak pollution controls. New efforts to mobilize resistance are occurring. The deep, long-range ecology movement inspires resistance by affirming the joy of human participation in (...) nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada by Angele Alook et al.Evangeline KroonAngele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker. The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2023. 240 pp., paperback, $25.95. ISBN 9781771136129.[End Page 280]The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada by Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël (...) Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker is both an imagining of a utopic, fossil-fuel-free world and a spirited call to action. Written in plain language and aimed at a wide audience, the book examines contemporary so-called Canada through an indigenous-centered,1 decolonial lens and frames the current climate crisis that we are in as one of relationship failure. The authors state: "We believe it is important for a just transition discussions to be accessible to all audiences because, fundamentally, what we're talking about in this book is repairing relationships. Repairing relationships with each other and with the land" (13). Key to repairing this relationship is putting indigenous rights and sovereignty at the center of any proposal or policy, instead of appearing as an add-on or afterthought. As the authors lead us through their plan for a just energy transition, they assert that any change, any movement, and any economic strategy that does not assert indigenous rights is not only "greening theft," it is also doomed to fail (7).The book is organized into two parts. The first part consists of the introduction and the first two chapters, where the authors outline broken promises and political and private decisions that have led to the current climate crisis in so-called Canada. The second half then outlines indigenous-informed solutions and possible paths forward, with the most concrete and "winnable" strategies in the last two chapters (153). The End of This World is a collaborative piece, written in one voice, while the individual authors' voices can be heard through various examples and anecdotes given throughout the book.In the first half of the volume, they lay out the rise and reliance on fossil fuels, the ongoing empowerment of the industry, and the swaths of broken promises the Canadian government has made since public concern for climate has been on the rise. The authors focus on two dynamics that they believe are the worst contributors to this crisis in so-called Canada: "the violation of indigenous people's inherent rights and sovereignty, and the fossil fuel economy that relies on this violation" (11). This is done by tracing the sordid history of indigenous-settler relations through official documents such as the [End Page 281] Indian Act and the residential school system, which systematically destroyed traditional indigenous relationships with each other and the land and replaced them with patriarchal capitalist colonial hierarchies. The authors argue that this destruction, along with the forced removal of indigenous people from their lands, effectively brought about an apocalypse, the aftereffects of which indigenous people across all of so-called Canada are still dealing with. This is an incredibly effective rhetorical strategy, pulling on the popular cultural imagination of the apocalypse and reframing the settlers' view of this world as an indigenous dystopia.The authors then lay out how the official policies and privatization of the industry by the Canadian state laid the groundwork for weakening resistance against fossil fuel projects on traditional indigenous territories, and for stripping the lands of resources and further alienating all people from their relationships with the land. They point out that when indigenous mobilization was finally recognized in the 1970s and 1980s, a swell of popular support from unions, labor activists, and environmentalists pushed back against rampant development and extraction. However, instead of strict regulation and limitation, the authors make it clear how the government and industry simply switched from climate denialism to "climate delayism," using terms like "sustainable development," "net zero goals," and "carbon neutrality" to push responsibility to the future and make no real changes, all while actually increasing development and projects in the industry.The greatest strength of this section is how... (shrink)

How are we to understand hunger strikes and episodes of lip-sewing in immigration detention? Are they simply cases of self-destruction or bare life, as is often claimed, or is there scope to view these embodied acts of self-harm as having a political dimension and to see those engaged in them as resistant subjects exercising political agency? To explore these issues, I draw on recent feminist theoretical work on vulnerability. Received wisdom suggests that vulnerability is an impediment to political action. Rejecting (...) the idea that vulnerability equates exclusively to injurability and passivity, I contend, by contrast, that corporeal vulnerability can potentially prompt action, serve as a resource for collective acts of resistance, and enable the politicization of certain spaces. Since context matters to how vulnerability and resistance intersect, I illustrate my argument by exploring, in particular, the protests that took place at Woomera immigration detention centre in Australia in 2002. (shrink)

As reaction to the failures of the globalization process, which is based on a commodification of the whole life new resistance mobilizations occurred. The Occupy Wall Street Movement has underlined that the social consequences of the neoliberal empire call for new resistances, new visions of solidarity, and new ways of representation. It has become clear, that capitalism’s influence on democracy has made that concept insufficient. The sovereign biopower is regulating life and survival via granting access or exclusion from (...) resources. It not only disciplines and normalizes sexualities, bodies and gender but regulates health, security, etc. of everybody. Therefore responsible theology needs to expand Feminist, Gender and Queer critique and my approach is to offer a reaction by developing a critical Bio-Theology using Foucault’s critique of biopower and Castoriadis’ concept of the radical social imaginary. This paper uses inter- and transdisciplinary methodology bringing together ‘beyond liberation theology’ approaches with queer, postcolonial, epistemological intersectionality critique and post-secular debates. (shrink)

Many governments and corporations have embraced information disclosure as an alternative to conventional environmental and public health regulation. Public policy research on transparency has examined the effects of particular disclosure policies, but there is limited research on how the construction of disclosure policies relates to social movements, or how transparency and ignorance are related. As a first step toward filling this theoretical gap, this study seeks to conceptualize disclosure conflicts, the social processes through which secrecy is challenged, defended, and mobilized (...) in public technoscientific controversies. In the case of shale oil and gas development in the United States, activists and policy makers have demanded information about the contents of fluids used in the extraction process and the routes of oil shipments by rail. Drilling and railroad companies have resisted both demands. Studies of such disputes reveal the dynamic and conflictual nature of information disclosure. In both cases, disclosure conflicts unfold dynamically over time, reflecting power disparities between industry groups and their challengers and requiring coalitions of activists to pursue multiple tactics. When a disclosure policy is established, it does not resolve social conflict but shifts the focus of struggle to the design of information systems, the quality of disclosed data, and the knowledge gaps that are now illuminated. (shrink)