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She also contextualizes LGBTQ participation by detailing how the Sandinista revolution rejected "sexual disorder" (47) as a product of I Somocismo i (support for the Somoza era/dictatorship). I Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship and Social Movements i is a new addition to LGBTQ Movement studies as an important ethnographic and historical text that not only documents the Nicaraguan LGBTQ movement, but also the social and political history of Nicaragua as mediated by the experiences and participation of LGBTQ individuals and collectives. Kampwirth provides us with an overview of how Sandinista policies shaped LGBTQ sociality, political and economic participation and movement through public space. [Extracted from the article]

The consensual climate of the post‐political order has been recently disrupted in Europe. The mass protests staged in different European countries and the resurgences of the extreme parties in response to the multiple European crises witness the "cracks" in consensual politics. While much of the scholarly attention has been drawn onto the socio‐political implications of large‐scale upraises, the contribution of bottom‐up sub‐national groups to the "return of the political" has been under‐researched. Therefore, this article focuses on sub‐national grassroots groups as instances of the "properly political" (Swyngedouw 2009, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33[3]:601–620). It is contended that these groups, by putting in place acts of solidarity, are "agonistic" political forms, containing in nuce the potential to counteract the post‐political order and to shape a new politics. To interrogate this argument, the article reports the findings of a case study analysis involving four grassroots groups based in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative politics of democracy shape and are shaped by dominant forms of democracy in circular fashion. In 2009 practitioners of Brazil's many Afro‐Brazilian religions gathered in Salvador to develop a religiously grounded mode of democratic politics. Mobilizing a religious formulation of respect, participants in the gathering subsumed government ideals of democratic practice under Afro‐Brazilian religious norms of hierarchy and the social order that they presupposed. These efforts were predicated on an artful combining and adapting of democratic and religious discourses and interactional practices. The Afro‐Brazilian religious politics of democracy that was articulated by this political project did not only reflect religious valorizations of hierarchy but it also established a new foundation for democratic politics in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally assumed that national commemorations have the power to increase national attachment. This is because such ceremonies highlight shared history, communicate core values, and have the potential to decrease conflicts in societies, while celebrating and mourning together enhances attachment to the group. Remarkably, only a limited number of studies have empirically studied the relation between participation in national commemorations and feelings of national attachment. Studies that have addressed this question focused mainly on the intentions of the organizing elite, employed qualitative research designs, or suffered from methodological problems such as causality. In this study, we examined participation in Dutch liberation festivals by means of survey data. We compared people's feelings of national attachment before they visited the liberation festival with people's feelings of national attachment after they visited the festival, but no evidence was found for the integrative role of national ceremonies. In the concluding section, we discuss potential reasons why the expected positive relation was not found and formulate suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical frameworks, specific skills for leaders, and guidance to effectively work with others across difference as well as practice freedom to facilitate transformational social movements are explored in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on various aspects related to voter mobilization. It states factors that affect voters such as diverge interpretations, voter turnout, and the role of eyespots for judicious interpretation. Also mentioned two important concerns relative to voter mobilization such as multiple hypothesis testing and fragility of significant effect.

Resumen Las tasas femeninas de actividad y empleo caen desde mediados del decenio de 2000 en toda la India, y en particular en Kerala, que era históricamente el estado con mejores resultados. Se analiza la evolución de estas tasas en Kerala entre 2004 y 2012, según ingresos de los hogares, edad, nivel de instrucción y categoría ocupacional. Las jóvenes más calificadas abandonan la vida activa, lo que hace pensar en un desaliento exacerbado por el aumento de la brecha salarial de género en las ocupaciones de más alto nivel. Estos cambios están eliminando algunos de los logros que hasta ahora distinguían al mercado de trabajo de Kerala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 2012, students in Quebec went on strike against a proposed 75% increase in university tuition and the further privatization of education that it signaled. The strike lasted 6 months and repeatedly mobilized hundreds of thousands of students and supporters in collective action. Emphasizing the 'broader dreams of a student movement now sparking the popular imagination', some activists began calling for a 'rêve général illimité' (unlimited general dream). This article brings together scholarship on creative tactics and the role of space in protest to analyze a range of imaginative and affective interventions as well as the debates that emerged concerning their role within the movement. I argue that creative tactics intervened in how space and time were constructed by altering the relationships amongst private and public space. As a result, responsibilities were redistributed and time typically consecrated to the pursuit of private ends was redeployed during the Quebec student strike, broadening participation and generating public spaces where care was collectivized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, 'free spaces' and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politiciz ing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms - adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congregation-based community organizing ( CBCO) federations play an important role in uniting a diverse array of religious congregations and community-based organizations in movements for social justice at the neighborhood, regional, state, and national levels. Metropolitan-level CBCO federations provide a novel and noteworthy example of meso-mobilization contexts as described in the social movement literature in that many such federations engage in multiple concurrent issue campaigns. This study examines collaboration among organizational members of Communities Creating Opportunity, a CBCO federation based in Kansas City, Missouri. Qualitative interviews with organizers, clergy, and lay-leaders, together with an analysis of organizational records, reveal a cooperative structure of interorganizational relations built upon specific organizing activities, roles, and relations. These activities, roles, and relations are in turn conditioned on each member organization's own level of connection to a particular organizing issue. Findings suggest that this innovative form of cooperative relational structure affords multi-issue federations an enhanced capacity to mobilize voluntary labor resources and turn-out at public events relative to single issue organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to providing tools of "how to keep your cool on a warming planet", as the title implies, the book also will be useful to pause and reflect on the next steps and to work against fissures and tensions within the climate movement itself. And Ray convincingly mobilizes insights, tactics, and strategies from feminist or anti-racial struggles for the climate generation. [Extracted from the article]

This paper uses Gallup poll data to assess two narratives that have crystallized around the 2011 Egyptian uprising: (1) New electronic communications media constituted an important and independent cause of the protests in so far as they enhanced the capacity of demonstrators to extend protest networks, express outrage, organize events, and warn comrades of real-time threats. (2) Net of other factors, new electronic communications media played a relatively minor role in the uprising because they are low-cost, low-risk means of involvement that attract many sympathetic onlookers who are not prepared to engage in high-risk activism. Examining the independent effects of a host of factors associated with high-risk movement activism, the paper concludes that using some new electronic communications media was associated with being a demonstrator. However, grievances, structural availability, and network connections were more important than was the use of new electronic communications media in distinguishing demonstrators from sympathetic onlookers. Thus, although both narratives have some validity, they must both be qualified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements and the messages they wish to spread are essentially visual phenomena. Although this is both an obvious and momentous assertion, social movement research has been hesitant to integrate visual data. Until lately, most insights into the use of images in social movements originated from historical and media studies. This contribution presents the recent surge in literature devoted to the visual analysis of social movements. It focuses on activists' practices of image production and distribution under certain media-historic constellations. In this perspective, the current opportunities to create and spread images of dissent are contrasted with previous appropriations of technical possibilities from early print to electronic media. In times of mobile devices combined with social network sites, scholars of movement images are confronted with profound changes in the ways images contribute to the emergence and dynamics of social movements. Thus, we argue for a media-sensitive analysis of images in social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical and autonomous urban movements like the European squatters' movement tend to resist integration into the institutions of the state, although particular legal and political conditions in each country or city may significantly alter this tendency. In this article, I examine the controversial issue of 'institutionalization' among squatters, focusing on the few cases of legalized squats (social centres) in the city of Madrid. Negotiations with the state authorities and processes of legalization are the major forms of institutionalization involving squatters. However, an anomalous kind of institutionalization also emerges once squats, whether legalized or not, become consolidated and socially accepted. For squatting to have a successful impact, then, depends on both the type of autonomy achieved by squatters and the different outcomes of the processes of institutionalization. The case of Madrid provides empirical evidence that: (1) negotiations with state authorities were very frequent among squatters, but most were defensive; (2) the few cases of legalization were due to specific conditions such as the urban centrality of the squats, single-issue identities, social network solidarity, favourable media coverage, formal organizations working as facilitators and the squatters' leadership of the process. Furthermore, legalized squats in Madrid preserved a high degree of autonomy, self-management and ties to other radical social movements. In conclusion, both the legalized squats and the squatters' movement in Madrid as a whole, avoided 'terminal institutionalization' and, instead, gave shape to a 'flexible' one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Euromaidan protests on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv, or Kiev, Ukraine from November 2013 through January 2014. The role that student protesters played in the Euromaidan protests, including in regard to their putative desire that the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych sign the Association Agreement with the European Union (EU), is discussed. An overview of the social movement behind the Euromaidan protests, including its representation of civil society groups, the political opposition, scholars and activists, is provided.

Energised by highly visible, media-friendly issues of sexualisation and representation, new'fourth-wave'feminism must not dismiss concerns of structural inequality as relics of a previous age, argues Melissa Benn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1982 and 2011, four Israeli governmental reports addressing ostensible dangers from "cults" (new religious movements, or NRMs) were issued. The 1980s reports use a collectivist discourse, in which the state sees itself as defending the collective's borders firm external threats and representing various sectors while seeking consensual values. The 1990s report marks an interim stage in which the state tries to balance individual liberties with sectoral interests. The 2011 report focuses solely on harm to individuals and is the harshest of the four. The reports reflect milestones in three processes of change that have taken place in Israeli society: from a collectivist-hegemonic ethos to a multisectoral one; from a focus upon society to a focus on the individual; and from nationalistic values to universalistic ones. At every point in time, NRMs represented a different perceived threat to Israeli society. We explain how multisectoralism brings about both tolerance toward new religious phenomena and fierce anti-cultic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the association between perceptions of broader changes in the social-ecological context and individuals’ subjective well-being (SWB). Macro-level societal changes such as globalization or demographic change give rise to new demands for individual functioning at work and/or in the family. Such new demands associated with social change are stressful and likely to be related to lower levels of SWB. Being active agents, individuals attempt to deal with social change and its increasing demands to protect their SWB. The present study investigates which kinds of control strategies are most effective in protecting one's SWB. Specifically, we predicted that control strategies of goal engagement will be most effective under conditions of perceived high control, and control strategies of goal disengagement will be most effective under conditions of perceived low control. In a large sample of 2537 German adults, work- and family-related demands associated with social change were found to be negatively linked to SWB. Moreover and in line with the motivational theory of lifespan development, control strategies of goal engagement and disengagement were beneficial for SWB to the extent that they matched the perceived control of the demands associated with social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class-based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market-oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non-governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power-laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno-religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the 'new urban poverty' ( NUP) ( Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long-term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi-scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post-bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule-setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Education-migration nexus' policies in Australia between 1998 and 2010 linked international education with different forms of temporary and permanent migration. This resulted in a blurring of boundaries around student, worker, consumer, migrant and ethnic identities. While the exploitation, marginalization and vulnerability of international students in Australia has gained a great deal of media and scholarly attention, less consideration has been given to the varied forms of subsequent protest undertaken by student migrants in Australian cities. This article analyses three case studies of protests involving student migrants in Melbourne: a protest against unfair assessment; a fight for a campus prayer room; and labour protests within the retail service and taxi industries. It draws on theoretical work on new social movements and social transformation in urban spaces to find ways to conceptualize this activism in relation to the scales of campus, city and nation. In doing so, it argues primarily that these sites of protest are socio-spatial experiences that encompass shifting and socially produced spatial scales, as well as complex networks of association across different communities, which in turn reflect different student-migrant identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions on social movements in Asian cities are inseparable from the abundance of public rallies in the region. In this article, I look at the case of Thamrin- Sudirman, the main thoroughfare in Jakarta, Indonesia, to uncover how physical urban spaces constituting part of the city as living systems broaden the reach of social movements' agendas. The study involved continuous observation at rallies, interviews with social movement leaders and participants, and a look at simultaneous public rallies in various cities. This article analyzes the sites of public rallies as 'megaphones', based on the patterns of issues featured in the rallies, the groups participating, and the nodes and paths that they constructed. Two key dimensions of the megaphone are: (1) the symbolic and historical significance of the sites of rallies; (2) the relationship between the space and the media. Particular sites in cities become places where information is gathered, distributed and transferred through the media, facilitating a network among cities. This article concludes that cities are agents of political actions that amplify ideas and spread them across the globe. The urban centers' megaphonic function results from the synergy between the public space in the built environment and the public sphere, and is reflective of the recentering of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durban has a long tradition of activism and the creation of participatory spaces. The Umlazi Occupy is one example. In 2012 some 3,000 residents of Umlazi township 'occupied' the area outside the municipal councillor's office for the period of a month. The reasons behind the Occupy protest included demands for better services and higher levels of political accountability. This contribution examines the Umlazi Occupy with a focus on the nature of post-2010 activism and its key actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There are scholars of conflict resolution and scholars of social movements, and rarely do the twain meet. Continuing an in-person dialogue, three scholars whose work touches both fields consider the lessons each has to contribute to the other. The paper explores power dynamics, activism solidarity, negotiation strategies, and more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter describes four social movements that developed in the early twentieth century in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes issue with a mode of argumentation advanced by a number of left-leaning, radical scholars, including those associated with China's New Left, about the causes of the Tibetan unrest in China in spring 2008. According to this stance, the Tibetan protests were the result of external manipulation by neoconservative, reactionary forces, ranging from the CIA to the Dalai Lama. The unstated premise of this response is that taking a critical stance against western imperialism and neoliberal globalization necessitates a defense of China's policies in Tibet. Such arguments take the form of unfavorable comparisons between Tibetans and Palestinians especially because the former are often romanticized, suggestions that Tibetans are unfortunate ideological victims of US-funded propaganda, and claims that they should be grateful for Chinese state-funded development. This response renders Tibetans incapable of being authentic political subjects. A radical stance on Western imperialism and capitalism should reject such reductionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary anarchist practices display a strong ambivalence toward technology, with active resistance residing alongside extensive use and development. This article theorizes a broad-based anarchist politics of technology, which can account for these diverse expressions within a coherent framework. I first examine the two major competing approaches to technology in anarchist literature—Promethean anticapitalism and the primitivist critique of civilization. Noting the limitations of both approaches, I then turn to the work of Langdon Winner and other critical theorists of technology who stress the inherence of social relations in technological design and deployment. Such a perspective allows anarchists to judge technologies according to their promotion of hierarchical or nonhierarchical social practices, leading to three options for action: abolitionism, guarded adoption, and active promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals frequently perceive positive changes in themselves following adversity; after a collective trauma, they may perceive such benefits in others or in their society as well. We examined perceived benefits of the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks in a 3-year study of a national sample of adults (N = 1382). Many individuals (57.8%) perceived social benefits of 9/11, including increased prosocial behavior, religiousness, or political engagement. Individuals who found increased national religiosity as a benefit 2 months post-9/11 reported greater positive affect and life satisfaction and lower distress and posttraumatic stress up to 3 years post-9/11. Pre-9/11 religiousness and Republican political affiliation predicted perceiving religion-related social benefits post-9/11. Perceptions of social change are important but understudied responses to stressful events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How relevant is the anti-globalization movement to the ideas and activities of social movements seeking to achieve economic justice and greater democratic accountability in southern Africa? Case study research in four southern African countries (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Swaziland) indicates that, while aspects of the anti-globalization approach resonate with civil society and social movement actors (for example, an emphasis on mass participation and the internationalization of campaigning), the global social justice movement frequently displays the characteristics of globalization. These include: unaccountable decision-making; profound (yet largely unacknowledged) inequality of access to resources; and an imposed and uniform organizational form that fails to consider local conditions. The World Social Forum (WSF) held in Nairobi in January 2007 provided many southern African social movement actors with their first opportunity to participate in the global manifestation of the anti-globalization movement. The authors interviewed social movement activists across southern Africa before and during the Nairobi WSF about their experiences of the anti-globalization movement and the Social Forum. An assessment of the effectiveness of this participation leads to the conclusion that the WSF is severely limited in its capacity to provide an effective forum for these actors to express their grievances and aspirations. However, hosting national social forums, their precise form adapted to reflect widely varied conditions in southern African states that are affected by globalization in diverse ways, appears to provide an important new form of mobilization that draws on particular elements of anti-globalization praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the author's participation and work in the Children's Urban Geographies project relative to his engagement in public scholarship. The author notes that being both a mother and a professor, one of her greatest challenges in the project was the struggle to move away from the constant teaching moments and didactic mode of interacting with children that comes to her most naturally. While working with the project, the author realized that public scholarship need not necessarily be about large-scale or rapid social change. The value of listening to people, and of the small, incremental steps that may take years to lead to something more, but that often lead to something better, are far more important.

This article explores a range of conversations in Czech that have been undertaken by popular and intellectual Czech feminists since 1989. These have attempted to ‘explain the usefulness of feminist thinking’ to frequently reticent Czech audiences. It examines feminists' claim that feminism and feminist social criticism have an important role to play in making a new social order in which what they describe as women's values and cultures would have a central place. It explores the often maternalist strategies that intellectuals have devised for working through the pall of ambivalence that surrounds feminism in the Czech Republic, and it examines how an enthusiastic defence of local feminisms and the desire to highlight intransigent attitudes towards the remaking of gender identities have become important hallmarks of contemporary Czech feminisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relationships between the Bolivian State and the emerging indigenous and peasant social movements have become increasingly fluid since the end of the 1970s. Although this process could be traced back to the 1953 Agrarian Reform, it was not until the world crisis of the 1970s and the surge in globalisation that it led to radical changes in the relationship between State and indigenous peoples. Seen from the point of view of the State, our case study of a group of Quechua communities seems to illustrate a process of fragmentation leading to ungovernability and disorder. This understanding has to do with a lack of ‘legibility’. However here I replace that ‘image’ of disorder with another ‘feeling’ of cultural ordering, one that emerges from indigenous people's livelihoods, strategies and governance from below. I argue for understanding the apparent lack of governance as the expression of an autonomous reorganising process that leads to the regrouping and expansion of indigenous localities linked into new forms of regionalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prilleltensky's notion of psychopolitical validity elevates power as a key phenomenon of interest within community psychology. Importantly, two types of psychopolitical validity are articulated: epistemic—the explicit study of power, and transformative—understanding the role of power in social change. In this article, the author develops the concepts of epistemic and transformative power by presenting a framework for understanding their application to community phenomena. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the thesis that it is unethical to plan an action for social change without excavating the knowledge and wisdom of the people who are responsible for implementing the plans of action and the people whose lives will be affected. But the people, being immersed in contemporary complexity, do not know what they know until they know it as a consensus emerging from structured dialogue among a group which represents all stakeholders. We argue that the science of dialogic design may be used to achieve such an emergence. As a consequence, it satisfies the Özbekhan Axiom of Engagement and the Laouris Law of Requisite Action. The paper elaborates for the first time on the ethics of the ‘Tree of Action’, which some stakeholders participating in co-laboratories have called the ‘Tree of Life’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing understandings of protest and cultures of resistance has been a central theme of the ‘new’ cultural geography of the 1990s and 2000s. But whilst geographers of the here and now have been highly sensitive to the importance of acts of protest which occur outside of the context of broader social movements, geographers concerned with past protests have tended to focus overwhelmingly upon either understanding the development of social movements or highly specific place-based studies. Through a focus upon the hitherto ignored practice of ‘tree maiming’, this paper demonstrates not only the value of examining specific protest practices in helping to better understand the complexity of conflict, but also how in periods of acute socio-economic change the evolving relationship between humans and the non-human – in this case trees – is a central discourse to the protest practices of the poor. Such attacks often involved complex cultural understandings about the ways in which trees should – and should not – be socially enrolled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To develop inductively a preliminary list of rhetorical tools that sociologists use in their presentation of facts, we examine three general claims that are widely accepted as having been demonstrated empirically in the field of social movements: social networks are necessary for recruitment of new members; individual mental traits do not matter; and political opportunities are necessary for movement emergence. We identify eight rhetorical tools that helped promulgate these claims as facts. We all use techniques like these, but awareness about them can help us evaluate our arguments and find better ways to test them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past fifty years, a number of approaches to the recovery of the multiple pasts of Hinduism have held the field. these include that of the discipline of History of religions as it is constituted in North America as well as those of the Hindu nationalists, the colonial and post-colonial historians, and the subaltern studies school. None of these approaches have proven satisfactory because, for methodological or ideological reasons, none have adequately addressed human agency or historical change in their accounts of the pasts out of which modern-day Hinduism has emerged. The Hindu nationalist historians hark back to an extended Vedic golden age in which religious practice remained unchanged until the corruptions spawned by the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. Many Western indologists and historians of religion specializing in Hinduism never leave the unalterable ideal worlds of the scriptures they interpret to investigate the changing real-world contexts out of which those texts emerged. The colonial and postcolonial historians focus on the past two hundred years as the period in which all of the categories through which India continues to interpret itself—including Hinduism—were imposed upon it from without. Adducing examples of Hindu practitioners and thinkers from the colonial period, subaltern theorists and others argue that historical thought is itself alien to the authentic Indian mind. This article suggests a number of interpretive strategies for retrieving the multiple Hinduisms of the past and of the medieval period in particular as that time out of which most modern-day practices of Hinduism emerged. These include an increased emphasis on non-scriptural sources and a focus on regional traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ways in which the department store has become a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity through the introduction of images and goods taken from the West, along with the emphasis on “Western design” and “Western taste”. These new consumer spaces have become aestheticized in various ways so that we can speak of an “aestheticization” of everyday life. Yet this was also a modernizing learning process for Japanese consumers, hence a key problem was how these new experiences were to be classified and ordered into a relatively stable habitus. The rise of the department store has had an important mediating function here. Department stores not only provided new goods along with interpretations of how to use them, but also acted as theatres, as rehearsal spaces, with front and back stage areas where one can watch the performance, try out for oneself new roles. This is especially the case for women in the city, who were able to explore a new identity space with a new set of competence experiences and pleasures. In this process, the department store also provided a form of women's public sphere where they could enjoy shopping, entertainment and learning opportunities. Department stores encouraged not only a sense of luxury and theatrical settings, but also help to teach women how to assemble new tastes and styles into their lifestyle. In addition, it should be emphasized that in the Japanese case, department stores also played an important role not just as a new cultural initiative on the part of the businessmen and cultural intermediaries who invented consumer culture, but also as a political initiative on the part of the government who sought to link them to the reform of everyday life and the production of good Japanese citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the ‘near death’ experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and ‘social death’ associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to ‘new life’ and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen-activist and member of a social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns with how cultural factors influenced agrarian social change remained an abiding interest in the work of James Scott. I begin by sketching out the context of debates in Marxist theory, development studies, and social and political anthropology that, during the 1980s, turned to relations between ideas, power, and processes of conflict and change in a world of new postcolonial nations and rapid agrarian development. In the article, then, I carefully examine the ideas Scott developed about resistance and hegemony in conversation with the work of E. P. Thompson. Tracing the genealogy of Scott's ideas about hegemony and rural social protest, I comment in some detail on the literature on resistance that arose in anthropology during the 1980s and the role of Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) in shaping that literature while interacting with Subaltern Studies (Guha 1982-87), studies of social movements, and examinations of power in interpersonal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By studying and writing about social revolutions and popular protest, James Scott has provided anthropologists and social theorists with a wide-ranging analytical vocabulary for speaking about peace and its inseparable twin- violence. His particular area of expertise has been the arts of repressive peace, and the artfulness of those who elude or defy such silencing technologies. The publication of The Moral Economy of the Peasant in 1976 initiated the first interactions between Scott's unique brand of political theory and anthropology in the shared topical space of peasant studies and the shared geographic space of Asian studies. The authors of this "in Focus" have assembled this special collection to celebrate and evaluate those and subsequent interactions covering a quarter of a century and spanning the publication of at least three other books: Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Seeing Like a State (1998). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Al-Qaeda is widely regarded by the military, law enforcement, diplomatic, and intelligence communities as being the foremost threat to U.S. national security and safety. The nature of this threat, however, has changed since al-Qaeda first emerged in the late 1980s. This article describes the emergence of a new form of transnational terrorism and details al-Qaeda's progression from being an organization to an ideological movement. Drawing on a theory of social movements, we analyze its trajectory and the levels of influence. We also offer a behavioral perspective in explaining how al-Qaeda has adapted as a learning organization with new leadership, tactics, and patterns of recruitment and training. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated state-level variation in the number of right-wing militia groups. We built on prior quantitative examinations by more carefully operationalizing theoretical concepts and testing alternative hypotheses offered to account for the etiology of social movements generally and of militias specifically. Using negative binomial regression, we found that, consistent with previous research, states with higher levels of farm job loss had more militia groups. However, in contrast to prior studies, we did not find gun culture, hospitable political climate, female empowerment, or general economic deprivation to be associated with the number of militia groups. We also found no relationship between the number of militia groups and levels of fundamentalist religious culture and minority empowerment. Our study was the first to test the effects of social disorganization on the number of militias in a state, and we found the two to be positively and significantly associated. We situate our results in the theoretical and empirical literature and outline two challenges for future research. First, scholars must operationalize variables carefully since different measures of the same theoretical concept may result in diverging conclusions. Second, since one major factor (i.e., social disorganization) found in this study to be associated with the number of militia groups in a state was examined here for the first time, it is important for researchers to continue to investigate new hypotheses. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a debate on the World Social Forum (WSF). The fifth World Social Forum took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from January 26-31, 2005. After a one-year absence, when the Forum migrated to Mumbai, India, the original host city of the event in the southern State of Rio Grande do Sul, welcomed the more than one hundred and fifty thousand participants of the world's most global alternative political event back. Staged simultaneously with the World Economic Forum, the elite gathering in the Swiss Alps, the WSF has become the major focus of worldwide coordination of all kinds of anti-systemic activities at all scales, in urban and rural contexts, and of all cultures from around the world. Delegates from 120 countries participated in more than 400 cultural events and hundreds of more or less formal meetings. One newspaper estimated the number of marchers in the opening demonstration that filled the streets of Porto Alegre for hours at 200,000. Forum participants attended panels with some of the most well-known progressive public intellectuals from all corners of the world. And they listened to and debated with each other. Individual events range from the spectacular, the opening demonstrations, the mass meetings, the celebrities and the small conferences, the chance encounters, the music.

The article examines whether social forums are the future of social movements. A century ago, class issues seemed to be the organizing focus of progressive struggles in most of the world. Since the end of the second world war, the terrain of struggle seems to have changed. Anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, identity issues including ethnic, racial, gender issues, and urban social mobilizations around "collective consumption", which might include everything from anti-urban renewal, anti-displacement, antigentrification, anti-privatization and public service issues, and more recently alternative globalization protests, have all at various times seemed the successor to class struggles, although class continued to play a key role in many of them. Some of the literature focused the discussion on "urban" movements, although redefining that term; world-wide, progressive struggles today are at least as much rurally-based, if with urban connections, as they are city-oriented. If "urban" is considered in the sense Castells put it forward, as the sphere of collective consumption, it would indeed remain a central component of progressive struggles. But then it would also need to be linked to issues in the sphere of production.

The article presents abstract of several articles related to the issue of urbanization that are published in the March 2005 issue of the "International Journal of Urban and Regional Research." In the article "Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City," the author suggests that the cyborg metaphor usefully challenges dualistic conceptions of urban space that revolve around antinomies such as nature/culture, body/technology, real/unreal and concrete/abstract. A cyborg perspective highlights complexity, hybridity and indeterminacy and emphasizes facets of the urban experience that remain extensively hidden in conventional accounts. In the article "Cities in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History," establishes a comparative and historical framework for understanding the paradigms used in the study of cities in global context over the last fifty years. A leading premise of the analysis is that the rise and fall of certain paradigms for the study of global cities depends as much on historical and academic conditions in which urban scholars are nationally and institutionally situated as any so-called urban facts on the ground.

The major portion of this paper concentrates on social movements, how they operate and how they are changing both locally and at the global level. In addition, an attempt is made to frame— necessarily in an overly simplistic way— a view on differences in conception in world models, conceptions about how the world should be evolving and differences of perspective that are in particular represented by the social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]