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Social media and digital platforms have become essential tools for the new generation of youth activists. However, these tools subject youth to both new (and old) forms of surveillance and control. Drawing on in-depth interviews and social media walkthroughs with 61 youth activists, I examine hybrid tactics that these youth employ to resist surveillance and other forms of digitally mediated control as they participate in politics and social movements. I show that even in democracies like the United States and Canada, for individuals along intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender), public political acts do not capture the full range of young people's political repertoires. Young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt hidden, under-the-radar tactics in response to pressures of social, state, and corporate surveillance. I develop the concept of "digital infrapolitics" referring to the ways in which digital politics and activism go below the radar under surveillance and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Canada, the Raging Grannies are renowned for appearing, invited or not, in spaces not typically open to older women, with outrageous ‘Granny’ costumes and satirical songs. A movement of predominantly non-Indigenous, settler women, the Raging Grannies regularly work in diverse activist coalitions in pursuit of social and environmental justice; many are seeking to ally themselves with contemporary Indigenous movements. However, while analyses have so far focused on their highly visible and iconic activist strategies, their solidarity-building efforts remain under-examined. Based on focus groups, interviews, and participant observation carried out in 2014–2015, this paper probeswhyandhowRaging Grannies are building alliances with Indigenous movements in Canada. What emerges is an important tension. While many view their irreverent and theatrical strategies as quintessential to their ‘Granny Activism,’ such tactics were unanimously deemed inappropriate for engaging with Indigenous movements. Underpinned by reflections on their own settler histories, feelings of outrage at ongoing and state-sanctioned colonial practices, fears of inadvertently reproducing colonial relations, and a sense of interconnected futures with Canada’s First Peoples, they sought different, less-visible ways of practicing their solidarities. Many chose to attend rallies dressed in their everyday clothes, provide resources to Indigenous-led protests, invite Indigenous activists to speak at their gatherings, and work through their churches to redress past harm. Their solidarity efforts incorporated small acts, often pivoting around individual members’ personal connections. This article thus depicts the Raging Grannies as more diverse in their practices than typically recognized. It also addresses an important gap in scholarship on older women’s roles in solidarity movements. Finally, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that how solidarity is understood cannot be disconnected from how it is practiced, and thus demonstrating how solidarity can be relational, performative, and contingent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human rights transformed international politics beginning in the 1970s. This transformation was rooted in a dialectical relationship between international and domestic human rights institutions and movements. This article explores how we can use social movements, law, and politics to demonstrate the way international human rights norms were received, interpreted, and applied domestically and how this affected states' participation in international politics. The focus is on Canada, which was profoundly influenced by international human rights norms and in turn contributed to transforming international politics. These developments were especially pronounced in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forms of Indigenous contentious action, including blockades, marches, demonstrations, building occupations and fish- and log-ins are commonplace in Canada, but understudied. The likelihood of more of these events is high given the glacial pace at which grievances are being acknowledged. This paper asks what accounts for the variation in mobilization of Indigenous groups in unconventional forms of protest - non-routine and non-institutional - often "illegal" contentious action events in advanced, industrial, settler democracies? The applicability of three social movement theories, deprivation, Resource Management Theory (RMT) and New Social Movement (NSM) theory, are examined in providing explanatory leverage on Indigenous mobilization in contentious action in Canada. An examination of two cases will outline the explanatory usefulness of these theories: the blockades at Kanehsatake in 1990 (commonly referred to as the Oka Crisis) and the conflict at Burnt Church from 1999 to 2002. It determines that deprivation, NSM, and sometimes RMT are able to provide valuable insights into specific cases and also illustrate the fact that Indigenous contentious action across Canada is not the same, they, are not always driven by the same processes, goals, or identities. These theories can be useful analytical tools, but have little to offer in terms of predictive power and must be used carefully as explanatory tools. As opposed to being separate explanatory fields, they are most helpful used cooperatively rather than competitively. All of these theories must be able to take into consideration the impacts of colonialism on resources, on deprivation and on identity, in order to retain explanatory value in the case of Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, the relationship that land has to identity formation for Indigenous peoples must be accounted for, and can be done so within NSM theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Brigette approached me to write a piece for this collection I hesitated for weeks. Despite technically being a youth, I have never identified as being a 'youth activist' and for weeks I pondered why that was. I realized that even I had internalized the association between youth and apathy. Or at best, I assumed that youth within social movements were experimenting with counter-cultural politics. I have often imagined myself or other young people around me as being particularly 'mature', when in reality it is obvious that young people, as young people, are deeply committed to struggles for liberation and freedom. We should be celebrated and honoured as integral participants in the collective movements that we desire and are inspired by. I decided it was an apt moment to reflect on more than 10 years of engaging and mobilizing in grassroots multiracial feminist communities for social change as a young person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the failure of anti-oppression activists to build a movement in Canada. She says that activists are acting in ways that are destructive to an anti-oppression movement by failing to reach out and neglecting to mentor new leaders. She adds that the effectiveness of anti-oppression movements will be commensurate with the willingness of activists to constantly practice compassion. She also discusses the contrast between the experience of feminist activists and their conservative counterparts.

This article discusses the political activities of independent political groups seeking the creation of a sovereign nation-state of Quebec separate from Canada. These parties included the "Jeune-Canada," "Jeunesses patriotes" and several political newspapers. Despite their attempts to create a movement that would resonate with the entirety of French-Canadian's, they encountered numerous difficulties in taking their political ideas and forming a cohesive social movement to challenge the Canadian government.

The year 1965 represents a critical moment in the development and transformation of activist and student politics in the city of Toronto. This article explores the involvement of young Canadian activists with a variety of causes, such as support for African American Civil Rights, opposition to American imperialism, and the movement against the war in Vietnam. By matching their own political aspirations with those of their New Left counterparts in the United States, these activists participated in a larger transaction of radical thought, transformative strategies, protest tactics, and democratic alternatives. The adoption of this affective politics of solidarity was ultimately key to the emergence of more local, community-based activism, as well as the sharpening of an anti-imperialist critique within the emergent New Left in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This chapter summarizes the area of critically oriented environmental adult education, focusing on the relationship between historical contextual factors and Canada's current leadership in environmental adult education. A comparison of Canadian and American student environmental activism demonstrates how contextual factors shape nonformal learning and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing explanations of the increase in collective action surrounding victims’ rights in early 1980s Canada generally follow the precepts of political process, resource mobilization, and framing approaches in social-movements research by depicting the movement as a corollary of contemporary organizational, political, and cultural conditions. We find that the increase in activism, while certainly influenced by such factors, also required that victim-advocate groups properly manage, display, and frame the strong emotions associated with the victim experience – grief, fear, injustice, and anger – to maintain the internal integrity of the group as well as its external or public legitimacy. Our analysis contributes to social-movements analyses of how understandings of movement dynamics can be deepened by paying attention to how emotions play out in the process of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the youth activist cultures in urban Canada. It indicates the pressures faced by young activists which have been contributed by liberalism and neoliberalism. It explores the role of class and race in shaping contemporary youth activism, citing the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Sarah Thornton and Julie Bettie. It discusses the rituals of style as well as their relationship to consumption and identity. The author also indicates the symbolic elements of the subcultures of youth activists.

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The article focuses on the native women's activism against gender, sovereignty, and rights in Canada. According to the author, the Native women's struggle against social inequality, and violence were fortified by the Indian Act of 1868. The Indian Act was consolidated under Canadian Parliament authority, which addressed the issues on the rights, and status of Native people in Canada. It also discusses the structure of the Indian Act system. It is inferred that recognizing the Native rights to sovereignty is the first step for the decolonization, and social justice for and by the Native peoples.

Indigenous peoples in both Canada and the United States have engaged in numerous protests. Nevertheless, although these protests led to an ongoing national social movement in the United States, this has not been the case in Canada. This article draws on the sociological literature of social movements to explain this difference. Both cases have some key factors necessary for the formation of national social movements. These common factors include making purposeful political challenges and using noninstitutional tactics of protest. However, other necessary factors—strong leadership by social movement organizations, well-developed political networks, and the development of a strong national collective identity—are much weaker in Canada than they are in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada/Coalition pour le Droit à l'Avortement au Canada (ARCC-CDAC) is a bilingual activist group formed in October 2005. After describing the group's formation and its "virtual existence," this article places the coalition within the broader context of cyberfeminism, especially abortion politics on the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the historical studies of human rights in Canada. Is there such a thing as human rights history? Certainly a number of recent works could be filed within that category. Historian Michael Ignatieff has sketched a brief history of the rights revolution in Canada, examining how, in the postwar era, rights talk has transformed. Ignatieff is vague about the early details of this revolution, but a number of other recent works fill in some of the gaps. For example, James Walker and Constance Backhouse have provided case studies of the way in which political activists and the Canadian legal system affected the pre-Charter human rights of racial and religious minorities.

Data from a survey of 471 leading 1960s activists in Quebec and English Canada confirm hypotheses that strongly contradict predictions about the nature of post-1960 movements derived from the New Social Movements theory. It is argued that a new approach to developing a post-Marxist theory of social movements is needed, starting from a recognition that the politics of the left wing of post-1960 movements are "new left," not "new liberal." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policing of protest at international events conflicts with the political and policing culture of the host nation. Previous research shows a trend toward softer, more tolerant styles of policing protest within various Western democracies. We present a case study of an exception: the repression of protest at an international event in which one Western democracy hosted rulers of less democratic regimes in a ritual celebration of economic globalization. We explore reasons why, in the face of protests about undemocratic regimes elsewhere, the Canadian government and police were willing to use blatantly undemocratic tactics popularly believed to be more characteristic of those other regimes. Implications are discussed concerning protest policing, economic globalization, the nation-state and social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the pro-family movement in Canada. The pro-family movement organized in Canada in 1983 around a number of symbolic issues related to a defense of the traditional family and conservative moral values. This paper explores the likelihood of the pro-family leadership succeeding in this endeavor. To this end, the origins and the ideological development of the movement are discussed and empirical data on the socio-demographic background and the political beliefs of the membership are presented. In light of these data, the movement's potential to generate a consensus among its membership in support of a broad attack on social services and welfare spending is explored. Linked to the question of national impact is a prior question of mobilization. While the literature on social movements is rich in theories concerning how movements get started, there is little to guide explorations of the maintenance and reactivation of membership commitment -- especially when leaders of existing movements attempt to redefine the groups and social influences that are to be opposed.

The article discusses the life and works of Canada's most accomplished Communist intellectual, Margaret Fairley. According to the author, Fairley was born Margaret Adele Keeling in 1885 in Bradford, Yorkshire and the youngest of nine children belonging to a prestigious upper class of aristocratic conservatives. In addition, the author notes that Fairley has a strong sympathy and support for left-wing politics wherein she wrote small number of progressive articles related to the status of Canada depicting peace, dignity and development. It also offers information on the literary works of Fairley along with its implications for the community.

The article presents a comparison of four major nativistic social movements of the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century. Nativism, according to the author, is a nineteenth century form of bigotry. The concept came into use in the United States around 1840. The two movements of the U.S. are the Know-Nothing Movement (1850-1853) and the American Protective Association (A.P.A.) Movement (1890-1896). The two Canadian movements are the Orange Movement (1870-1896) and the Protestant Protective Association (P.P.A.) Movement (1892-1898). These movements are compared in terms of their organization, ideology, activities and impact in an attempt to assess their similarities and differences. Nativistic ideology in the U.S. may be described as vigorous Anglo-Saxonism, anti-catholicism and anti-radicalism. Both the Know-Nothing Movement and the American Protective Association Movement developed a patriotic press and armed with their ideology, influenced federal, state, and local elections. On the other hand, the ideology of Canadians nativists can be defined as a critical Anglo-Saxonism, anti-Catholicism and anti-radicalism.

The article presents a discussion on business ethics in Canada. It cites the two areas of concern such as the intensity of attacks by social activists on various forms of natural harvesting in Canada, and the advanced nature of Canadian business attitudes to issues like ageism, sexism, and gender preference. The intensity of social activism in Canada is noted as a primary factor in stopping or modifying commercial harvesting, more so than in any other country in the world. Greenpeace in Europe has spearheaded the attacks on Canadian harvest practices, including the collection of pelts from baby harp seals.

The author expresses her thoughts about the Idle No More protest movement among the Aboriginal peoples in Canada. She says that the privacy offered by the movement helped ensure that the grassroots could form the confidence required to organize creative actions. She believes that activists must learn from the strengths and weaknesses of other social movements. She adds that the movement's resilience will lie in the resilience of people to continue to rally.