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The book is a collection of ethnographic studies across Europe that focus on how food can symbolize identity and the relationship between "food value" and food practices, locally and across regions. In "Food Values in Europe," Valeria Siniscalchi combines her background in "anthropology of economic spaces" with Krista Harper's research experience in food systems, social movements, and urban public spaces to create a comprehensive edited collection on "food projects" in Europe. [Extracted from the article]

Andy Blunden's The Origins of Collective Decision Making is the first examination and investigation into counsel, majoritarianism, and consensus, the three principal methods and procedures by which groups come to an accord that is accepted by and acted upon by the greatest possible number of participants. He shows the millennial roots of majoritarianism, demonstrating the ethical roots of all three methods. He demonstrates majoritarianism's presence during the English Revolution of the 1640s and follows its development into the English working-class movement. Debunking previously made claims, Blunden shows that consensus originated in the 1930s in the United States with Myles Horton's Highlander School, through which it became a key principle of the civil rights movement via the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then of the antiwar and feminist movement through Women Strike for Peace. The first book of its kind, The Origins of Collective Decision Making is an invaluable resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu’s Minority Women and Austerity offers an important and much needed contribution to discussions on austerity, social movements, race and gender in Europe. Centring their analysis of the interplay between the 2008 economic crisis and activism in Europe on minority women and using a critical race studies and a black feminist epistemological framework, they make a bold epistemological move since, as the authors extensively demonstrate, European political racelessness renders intersectional claims and activism invisible, inaudible and illegitimate, while dominant social movement theories tend to ignore important forms of collective action that minority women develop. Thanks to their epistemological and analytical framework, their qualitative study, although limited to three national contexts, offers a lot of room for thinking both generalization and differentiation across and beyond their case-studies. Bassel and Emejulu’s work will thus certainly be inspiring for scholars working on similar issues in other European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Creativity and Humour in Occupy Movements, edited by Altug Yalcintas, the central focus revolves around Turkey's Gezi protests that occurred during the summer of 2013. Although the Gezi protests became well-known within the subtype of Occupy-style contentions, as covered in many scholarly publications, this volume distinguishes itself through its thematic concern with the roles that creativity, humor, and the "creative class" played in its unfolding. The book constitutes a welcome addition to the scholarship on contentious politics even as the role of creativity as social phenomena in relation to social movements remains understudied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Changes Everything, written by Naomi Klein, is an influential book on the biggest issue the world faces: human-created climate change. This book review presents the main arguments of this brilliant contribution. Klein argues that saying no to the powerful interests stopping us from stopping climate change is not enough but that both a “comprehensive vision” and “serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals” are needed. The book review discusses with some detail the tensions in Klein's ideas with respect to those political strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The central point Tarlau convincingly makes is that social movements can work with the state without being co-opted. Rebecca Tarlau's I Occupying Schools, Occupying Land i is a brilliant and important book for anyone interested in the relationship between social movements and the state. [Extracted from the article]

Envisioning strategies of the formation of political agency born out of the dynamics of domination, conflict, and emancipation occupies the central focus of Massimo Modonesi'sSubalternity, Antagonism, and Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject. It attempts a recuperation of Marxian analytical tools built around the conceptual categorical triad of subalternity, antagonism, and autonomy. These theoretical categories are analyzed through a rigorous and synthesizing explication of the respective Marxian practitioners of these theoretical plexuses, such as Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Negri, and Cornelius Castoriadis. The book rescues the conceptual metaphors of these thinkers in order to consolidate a wealth of Marxist concepts germane to the constitution of political subjectivity. A theoretical homology among these diachronic conceptual axioms is explored in order to yield a common ground in the Marxian problematic of subjectivation. Recent movements in Latin America are deployed as empirical reference frames to solidify Marxian ideas of subordination, resistance, and insubordination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]