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This paper analyzes literary, visual, and street art works of writers and artists from Eastern Ukraine produced during 2014. Two Donetsk artists, Serhii Zakharov and Anzhela Dzherikh, and two Luhansk writers, Serhii Zhadan and Olena Stepova, play with the myth of the proletarian Donbas, on the one hand, and debunk the popular perception of Donbas people as being in consent with the politics of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, on the other. They explore familiar tropes and images of Donbas and use guerrilla tactics (shock effects, provocativeness, and deception) to initiate public reaction to the war. Their works are united by their search for a shared communication space and direct access to the audience on occupied territories. These artists challenge the accepted perception of Donbas as a free but uncivilized space and participate in the creation of a new Donbas text. The interaction between politics, art, and activism makes their voices and vision powerful and infectious and can help achieve civic consolidation in Donbas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Nation women's engagement and resistance in the Muhammad Speaks (MS) newspaper. MS was created as the official publication of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960. The paper employed women as journalists and invited contributions from women who had registered with the group. Women's contributions to the paper's production and content reveal their readings of NOI mandates but they equally illuminate a gentle resistance to aspects of the organization. Elijah Muhammad's NOI implemented gender roles for men and women within the organization that were often inflexible. Women embraced the organization's gender roles and found ways to navigate the patriarchal dimensions of the movement. This paper argues that a careful analysis of women's writings for the MS newspaper reveals facets of their activism that have been overlooked in existing scholarly studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a historical examination of the ways in which advocacy strategies and tactics have shifted in relation to political opportunities, using a case study of a hydroelectric dam project in the Brazilian Amazon, known as the Belo Monte Dam. Drawing on over three decades of resistance by transnational activist coalitions, the paper looks at how new tactics and political alignments have altered the dynamics of activism and norm diffusion in Brazilian domestic environmental, human rights and development policies. The paper argues that current theories of norm diffusion inadequately explain backslides and tend to underestimate the complexity of domestic political alignments. The case adds political insight to our understanding of the relationship of transnational advocacy strategy to environmental and human rights political realities in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the attitudes of feminist activists, intellectuals and filmmakers to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s. It traces the development of mutual intellectual and political sustenance between feminism and anti-interventionism, arguing that as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles bred new ways of thinking about women's activism. In making this point, the paper complicates narratives of the “age of Reagan” that overlook the persistence of left-wing politics during the 1980s. Instead, it argues that a specific form of international feminism enabled a community of activists to contribute to a vibrant culture of dissent that criticized conservative approaches to women's rights and, at the same time, vigorously contested the interventionist foreign policy of the Reagan administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The year 1968 was and remains an emotion-laden topic in Italy, and yet few historians have used emotions to parse the history and memory of this period. This paper draws on a collection of interviews with former activists in the student movement and the New Left to explore the ways in which expressions of feeling in life-history narratives can flag up possible lines of difference in women's and men's stories. It draws on three emotive themes – rebellion, violence and liberation – to explore the interaction between gender, feeling, narrative, and what the author calls the ‘third person in the room’: meta-narratives of 1960s activism that can exert a powerful weight on the interview, blending and blurring the lines of individual and collective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]