Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,947
result(s) for
"Solidarity Movements"
Sort by:
Fragments of Solidarity
How is solidarity understood by the people who practice it actively and daily? What is the role of solidarity in reconciling the relationship of individuals with the collective demands of communities that fight for the rights of others? Based on a variety of anthropological, sociological, and philosophical writings as well as ethnographic research, Maria Giannoula takes an elaborated look at the emotional and spiritual aspects of political participation within an activist group in Greece in the 2010s. This study is a valuable resource for those researching social movements and alternative communities, focusing on the ways in which individuals organise their own forms of activism.
eBook
American relief aid and the Spanish Civil War
\" The Spanish Civil War created a conflict for Americans who preferred that the United States remain uninvolved in foreign affairs. Despite the country's isolationist tendencies, opposition to the rise of fascism across Europe convinced many Americans that they had to act in support of the Spanish Republic. While much has been written about the war itself and its international volunteers, little attention has been paid to those who coordinated these relief efforts at home. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War tells the story of the political campaigns to raise aid for the Spanish Republic as activists pushed the limits of isolationist thinking. Those concerned with Spain's fate held a range of political convictions (including anarchists, socialists, liberals, and communists) with very different understandings of what fascism was. Yet they all agreed that fascism's advance must be halted. With labor strikes, fund-raising parties, and ambulance tours, defenders of Spain in the United States sought to shift the political discussion away from isolation of Spain's elected government and toward active assistance for the faltering Republic. Examining the American political organizations affiliated with this relief effort and the political repression that resulted as many of Spain's supporters faced the early incarnations of McCarthyism's trials, Smith provides new understanding of American politics during the crucial years leading up to World War II. By also focusing on the impact the Spanish Civil War had on those of Spanish ethnicity in the United States, Smith shows how close to home the seemingly distant war really hit. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Before Bandung
The 1949 Conference of the Women of Asia held by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) amplified a new anti-imperialist solidarity movement for women in the global South. Leftist feminists emerged from anticolonial movements to organize mass-based women’s groups, a process that created new alliances between regional women’s groups. In India, and across Asia, most groups concentrated their efforts on rural women embedded in the agricultural economy. This article looks at the forms of solidarity and the ideologies of anti-imperialist women’s activism that turned the charity model of Western feminist internationalism on its head. Before the celebrated Bandung Conference of 1955, Asian and African WIDF members emphasized a solidarity of commonalty as well as one of complicity in the international women’s movement to fight colonialism and neocolonialism in the new postwar order.
Journal Article
The Good City
Can the contemporary city qualify as the topos of the good life, as it has in classical literature on human emancipation? As geographical entities, cities are hardly discernible places with distinct identities. They have become an endless inhabited sprawl without clear boundaries and they have become sites of extraordinary circulation and translocal connectivity. Similarly, sociologically, contemporary cities do not spring to mind as the sites of community and wellbeing.For the vast majority of people, cities are polluted, unhealthy, tiring, overwhelming, confusing, alienating. Politically, too, the contemporary city bears little resemblance to imaginings of the times when urbanism stood for citizenship, the ideal republic, good government, civic behaviour and the ideal public sphere. The politics of emancipation with a big 'P' is no longer a particularly urban affair in either genesis or practice, having given way to national and global institutions and movements. What remains of the urban as demos in these circumstances? At one level, clearly very little, as one instance in a wider demos or demon that pulls in many directions. This said, the urban remains an enormously significant formative arena, not only as the daily space of over half of the world's population, but also as the supremely visible manifestation of difference and heterogeneity placed together. Urbanism highlights the challenges of negotiating class, gender and ethnic or racial differences placed in close proximity. It also profiles the newness that arises from spatial juxtaposition and global flow and connectivity, forever forcing responses of varying type and intensity in the face of negotiating strangers, strangeness and continuous change. Possibilities thus remain for continuing to ask about the nature of the 'good city'. This paper outlines the elements of an urban ethic imagined as an ever-widening habit of solidarity built around different dimensions of the urban common weal. It offers a practical urban utopianism based around four registers of solidarity woven around the collective basics of everyday urban life. These are 'repair', 'relatedness', 'rights' and 're-enchantment'.
Journal Article
Movements Making Knowledge: A New Wave of Inspiration for Sociology?
Sociology's marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors' interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements' knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of 'talking between worlds'. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production.
Journal Article
From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism
Two prominent social progressive movements are faced with a few contradictions and a paradox. On the one side, we have a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worker-owned enterprises which suffer from certain structural weaknesses. On the other, we have an emergent field of open and Commons-oriented peer production initiatives which create common pools of knowledge for the whole of humanity, but are dominated by start-ups and large multinational enterprises using the same Commons. Thus we have a paradox: the more communist the sharing license used in the peer production of free software or open hardware, the more capitalist the practice. To tackle this paradox and the aforementioned contradictions, we tentatively suggest a new convergence that would combine both Commons-oriented open peer production models with common ownership and governance models, such as those of the co-operatives and the solidarity economic models.
Journal Article
Culture and Mobilization: Tactical Repertoires, Same-Sex Weddings, and the Impact on Gay Activism
Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. Our analyses, which draw on rich qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with participants and movement leaders and a random survey of participants, highlight these dimensions of cultural repertoires as well as the impact that the same-sex wedding protest had on subsequent activism. Same-sex weddings, as our multimethod analyses show, were an intentional episode of claim-making, with participants arriving with a history of activism in a variety of other social movements. Moreover, relative to the question of impact, the initial protest sparked other forms of political action that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California. Our results offer powerful evidence that culture can be consequential not only internally, with implications for participant solidarity and identity, but for political change and further action as well. We conclude by discussing the specifics of our case and the broader implications for social movement scholars.
Journal Article
The Logic of A Co-Operative Economy and Democracy 2.0: Recovering the Possibilities for Autonomy, Creativity, Solidarity, and Common Purpose
Over the past 30 years, the collectivist-democratic form of organization has presented a growing alternative to the bureaucratic form, and it has proliferated, here and around the world. This form is manifest, for example, within micro-credit groups, workers' co-operatives, nongovernmental organizations, advocacy groups, self-help groups, community and municipal initiatives, social movement organizations, and in many nonprofit groups in general. It is most visible in the civil society sector, but demands for deeper participation are also evident in communities and cities, and the search for more involving and less bureaucratic structures has spread into many for-profit firms as well. Building on research on this form of organization, this article develops a model of the decisional processes utilized in such organizations and contrasts these \"Democracy 2.0\" standards for decision making from the Democracy 1.0 (representative and formal) standards that previously prevailed. Drawing on a new generation of research on these sorts of organizations, this article and this special section discuss: (a) how consensus decisional processes are being made more efficient; (b) how such organizations are now able to scale to fairly large size while still retaining their local and participatory basis; (c) how such organizations are cultivating a more diverse membership and using such diversity to build more democratic forms of governance; (d) how such organizations are combatting ethnoracial and gender inequalities that prevail in the surrounding society; and (e) how emotions are getting infused into the public conversations within these organizations and communities.
Journal Article
Inequality in Interaction
In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteering with one that focuses on how inequality between volunteer and recipient of help is handled and (re)produced through interactions within voluntary groups. We focus on how empowerment projects with different interactional styles produce different forms of (in)equality on an interactional level despite dealing with very similar structural inequalities. We define interactional inequality as taking place along four dimensions: role distribution, framing rights, competencies, and sacrifice. Drawing on two different empowerment projects in the refugee solidarity movement in Denmark, we show how these dimensions of inequalities play out in the interaction between volunteers and refugees. We identify two strategies for overcoming the initial inequality between refugee and volunteer, one based on mutuality and another based on collectivity. Lastly, we show how these strategies produce interactional inequalities of their own.
Journal Article