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The reaction to conventional agriculture and food systems has generated a host of alternative social movements in the past several decades. Many progressive agrifood researchers have researched these movements, exploring their strengths, weaknesses, and failures. Most such research is abstracted from the movements themselves. This paper proposes a new way of self-organization that, while fulfilling traditional university demands on researchers, will provide research support for progressive agrifood movements by transcending the boundaries of disciplines and individual universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The paper seeks to offer a consideration of the adequacy of the concept of abeyance in accounting for women's movement processes in non-social movement organisations in periods characterised by quiescence rather than insurgence. Design/methodology/approach - The article is primarily conceptual. Findings - By extending the political process school of social movement theory, which relies heavily on visible activism to explain movement success, to include the new social movement approach, it is contended that underlying processes of change, associated with the values and affiliations of those involved in non-social movement organisations, become clearer. Less visible processes are identified through the variable rhythms and multiple, discontinuous experiences of women's movement supporters characterised as concealed adherents, informal networkers, and fellow travellers who can include male supporters. Research limitations/implications - Limitations: as the paper is primarily conceptual, there is a need to develop the practical implications beyond those mentioned below. Implications: there is a need to reorient research into organisational change to take fuller account of social movement processes. Practical implications - It is recognised that the literature on organisational and managerial change in non-social movement organisations needs to take account of the differing experiences and potential strategies of those likely to be affected. Originality/value - Originality of the paper lies in the use of insights drawn from the field of political sociology to enrich understanding of gender and organisational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The idea of considering the relationship established between Youth and Communication springs from the research "Musical Youth Mediations" which explores youth cultural production via the appropriation of alternative media. In this paper, we acknowledge the communicative developments present in web portals and recording studios which have been appropriated by the young and their culture, particularly the hip hop movement in Medellín. We consider this movement is a space that allows for identity ascription and a feeling of belonging, facts which in turn are strengthened by the development of their own languages, and that they help the young in exercising their skills to become active agents in reshaping their lives and their immediate surroundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnography explores the emancipatory dynamics of the Burning Man project, a one-week-long antimarket event. Practices used at Burning Man to distance consumers from the market include discourses supporting communality and disparaging market logics, alternative exchange practices, and positioning consumption as self-expressive art. Findings reveal several communal practices that distance consumption from broader rhetorics of efficiency and rationality. Although Burning Man's participants materially support the market, they successfully construct a temporary hypercommunity from which to practice divergent social logics. Escape from the market, if possible at all, must be conceived of as similarly temporary and local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of struggle against the industrial food system, academics still question the impact of the alternative food movement. We consider what food movement leaders themselves say about their motivation to act and their capacity to scale up their impact. Based on semi-structured interviews with 27 food movement leaders in Michigan, our findings complicate the established academic narratives that revolve around notions of prefigurative and oppositional politics, and suggest pragmatic strategies that could scale up the pace and scope of food movement impacts. In contrast to the apolitical perspective some scholars see guiding alternative food movements, local leaders we interviewed see the food system from a structural-political lens. Though some see strength in fragmentation, most are not under the illusion that they can work alone and aspire to build their collective strength further. Concerns about organizational survival and conflicting views about the goals of the food movement, however, present ongoing challenges. Ultimately, we argue that there is a middle ground food movement leaders can walk between prefigurative and oppositional politics, one that still attempts to intentionally change the state, while also maintaining the inventiveness that can come from autonomous, grassroots initiatives. Specifically, interviewees suggested that increased strategic capacity around policy advocacy, critical food systems education, and negotiation could help them extend cross-movement networks and mainstream more equitable food policies, while continuing to experiment with customized solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last six years, Greece has been hit by a vicious circle of relentless neoliberal restructuring programs. During the years of the crisis, throughout the country urban and rural communities of struggle have been formed, which tend to employ instituent practices and to acquire constitutive characteristics, in order to collectively address unmet social needs / desires and ensure their collective survival. In this context, socially reproductive commons in germ form have emerged with social and solidarity economy initiatives in their peripheries, alternative forms of life in common have been shaped and societies have been set in motion with the potential to establish the material foundations of their collective autonomy. Within this huge gap of social (re)production, the constituent power of social movements emerges in germ form as a resurgent force with the potential to address these needs and desires and, correspondingly, shape life in common. In the neoliberal era, it is this potential of a constituent counter - power that has the capacity to constitute the contending power to the dominant force of the capital - state complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other. A product of three decades of decomposition of the working class, nowtopians are different from “drop-outs” in general, or surplus populations that constitute the necessary “outside” to capital, in their conscious withdrawal from capitalist culture and concerted rejection of the value form. In emergent convivial “nowtopian” communities, largely grounded in unpaid practical work which creatively meets needs such as transportation (the bicycling subculture), food (urban gardening/agriculture), and communication (open-source communities), we see a gradual reversal of the extreme atomization of modern life. While facing the threat of corruption via re-integration into the system, this constellation of practices, if taken together, is an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated collective research and development effort exploring a potentially post-capitalist, post-petroleum future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master-slave dialectic and a Kojeve-influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, and that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant-garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]