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This article discusses the artwork of Azadeh Akhlaghi, a visual artist from Iran. Akhlaghi's series, titled "By an Eye-Witness," explores the documentation of past deaths in Iran's history, focusing on violent and traumatic events. The artist stages scenes depicting the deaths of poets, journalists, students, intellectuals, and political activists, imagining how these events would have been captured if mobile phone cameras had existed at the time. Akhlaghi's work challenges the official version of national history and invites viewers to consider the impact of photography on our understanding of historical events. [Extracted from the article]

The author shares the circumstances that led to his encounter with the personal archives of Victor Haim Perera (1934-2003), an award-winning Sephardic-American writer, journalist, environmental and political activist, and academic born in Guatemala City. Perera published six books on topics as varied as Sephardic history, the Maya Indians, and the Loch Ness monster, and contributed dozens of articles, short stories, and essays to newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and literary anthologies. This paper also provides an overview of Perera's life and work and shares information about the Victor Perera Papers collection at the University of Michigan Library. It presents a case study illustrating that library catalogers can improve discoverability of and access to library special collections by expanding beyond their core duties and investigating the contexts behind the materials that cross their desks. The article ends with a preliminary bibliography of Perera's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism has been hotly debated for decades, yet both political scientists and environmentalists have largely neglected its potential to galvanize popular support for the environmental movement. I argue that everyday experiences of being at home in one's environs, which I call "ecological belonging," can inspire a politics of self-defense in which everyday people act politically to defend their homes, broadly conceived, against the economic norms and institutions that threaten them with destruction. Drawing on the legacy of the American farmer-labor Populists of the late 19th-century, I call this politics in defense of home "ecological populism." Rather than rejecting the label of populism in light of its authoritarian and xenophobic varieties, I argue that environmentalists should embrace a pluralist and egalitarian populist politics to counter developmentalist policies that threaten to destroy the habitats and dwellings we call home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an editorial that pays tribute to the late Samir Amin, a prominent African scholar and activist. Amin was known for his Marxist perspective and his critique of capitalism and Eurocentrism. He advocated for delinking from capitalism and imperialism as a means of achieving inclusive development. The editorial highlights Amin's contributions to various fields, including development economics, political economy, and decolonization in Africa. It also introduces a special issue dedicated to Amin's legacy, which includes papers on topics such as Africa's socio-economic development, alternative development theories, and decolonization. The editorial emphasizes the continued relevance of Amin's ideas for Africa's development and the importance of implementing his recommendations. [Extracted from the article]

The forceful removal of Robert Mugabe in 2017 brought about high expectations of political transformation and debates on civil society's role in Mugabe's downfall. This paper examines civil society's role in the removal of Mugabe and the continuities and changes brought by the Emerson Mnangagwa regime. The paper contributes to studies that convincingly show that the Mnangagwa regime has failed to bring fundamental change to the 'new dispensation.' However, these studies do not capture civil society's role in Mugabe's downfall, its expectations of life after Mugabe, and people's lived experiences in the new dispensation. This paper locates this gap in the methodology employed by studies on the transition from Mugabe to Mnangagwa – these studies mostly analyzed policy documents, published literature, and newspapers. This methodology did not capture the voices of grassroots activists and organizations. Therefore, this paper used in-depth interviews to capture civil society's role in the downfall of Mugabe, its expectations of the new dispensation, and its lived experiences in the new dispensation. The paper argues that civil society played a sanitizing role in the ZANU-PF factional battles and the new dispensation that was an embodiment of hope has turned out to be an unanticipated horror since the expectations that the masses had have not been met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the life and research of professor and political activist Walter Rodney. Beginning with a brief biography of Rodney which discusses his birth in Guyana, his education, and his activism within political opposition movements, the paper ultimately examines a series of Rodney’s personal papers that have been archived in Atlanta, Georgia, Georgetown, Guyana, and London, England. The author recounts his own experience of traveling to each location to examine the papers. It is concluded that the papers give insight into why Rodney became an African historian and taught African history to the African and West Indian people.

Brand activism has become a popular term for describing how brands are becoming involved with controversial sociopolitical issues. The activist brand is thus characterised by its engagement with controversy and understood in and through macro-level cultural oppositions which it continuously orbits and positions itself against. The purpose of this paper is to contribute with a conceptual gaze at the activist brand's inherent controversy that enables an understanding of the online micro-level dynamics and processes that transform the online activist brand. Drawing on a narrative approach, the paper develops an ante- and counternarrative framework to explain how these complex micro-level dynamics and processes of resistance transform the brand. The framework allows us to approach the activist brand as the result of a complex network of antenarratives and counternarratives, which the brand flows in and out of, retells, supports, and resists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the labor dispute between National Union of Railwaymen General Secretary John Marchbanks and politician Oswald Mosley in Great Britain. Allegations of Marchbanks against the British Union of Fascists (BUF); Attribution of BUF to political violence; Experiences of activists Charles McEwan Dolan and Edward Bailey as fascists.

This article examines the success of paper-based alternative currencies in facilitating convivial, sustainable localised economies. Based on fieldwork in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, it discusses the capacity of activists to create alternative forms of currency that communicate the organisers' visions of a localised economy, before examining material practices: for whom do the currencies work, and who struggles to use them? Using insights from a diverse economies perspective, the article argues that we cannot read off the likelihood of an economic actor using the currency from the extent of their local economic embeddedness: economic actors in similar positions respond to the same stimuli in different ways, and local business owners and activists can form productive alliances to develop their shared project. The article concludes by arguing that local currencies should be used more proactively to stimulate new forms of concrete local production to meet locally identified needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]