Movement Action Research Articles

Hashtags, ruling relations and the everyday: institutional ethnography insights on social movements

The role of social media (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) in social movements has become the subject of academic and media discussion. This attention can be framed as debates over whether social media use encourages political participation, and whether the use of social media can be considered as a form of political activism. We suggest that analysis of social media in social movements can benefit from drawing on the work of Dorothy E. Smith. In this article we explain how paying attention to these media using an Institutional Ethnography perspective allows for insights on the activities of social movements and recognition of the use of social media without sliding into technological determinism. Following D. E. Smith, we argue that understanding contemporary social movements and their organisations in terms of the lived everyday/everynight experiences and interactions of historically situated people, texts and technologies provides a fruitful line of inquiry for further empirical research. We demonstrate the possibilities of such an approach by presenting examples from the Occupy Movement and the use of Twitter during political protests in Egypt (2011) and Iran (2009–2010). Taking this perspective allows us to identify and challenge the implicit boundaries drawn around what it means to be acting ‘politically’ in academic and media debates over social movements and social media.

What Motivates Cultural Progressives? Understanding Opposition to the Political and Christian Right

The goals put forth in What Motivates Cultural Progressives promise to be important for both religious and social movement scholars. This study centers around understanding how irrational factors come to play a role in, and in some cases determine, the activities of a social movement which claims to be based on rationality. As such, this text is an examination of group dynamics within social movements. While such a study might be located with any number of groups, the authors chose to focus on activists they claim oppose the religious right, cultural progressives. As interesting as this line of inquiry is, and despite the strength of the data analysis, there is trouble with this text that lies in the conceptualization and execution of the study which limits its utility. Most importantly, the two sides of the “war” being investigated are not clearly articulated, defined, and supported. The authors offer scant evidence that a culture war actually exists. While it is plausible that one could make the case for a culture war in the United States, it seems at least equally likely that there is no war writ large but rather a disagreement over key issues (e.g., abortion). This is partially problematic because the authors claim that cultural progressives make up a social movement and are thus governed by the same social dynamics that all social movements are subject to, which compel them all toward irrational behaviors. Yet it is not clear how, or even if, cultural progressivism qualifies as a movement. While various claims about goals and ideologies are made which present progressives as an identifiable group opposing the Christian right, these claims are not supported. Additionally, the theoretical discussion suggests a conflation between group norms in general and norms specific to movements (e.g., anecdotally presenting the NBA lockout as a movement).

Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora by Carol Silverman (review)

Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. By Carol Silverman. (American Musicspheres.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. [xxvii, 398 p. ISBN 9780195300949. $55.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index, companion Web site.This book discusses Romani (Gypsy) musicians and musical styles from the Balkans. It introduces and discusses numerous musicians primarily from Bulgaria and Macedonia to show how over a thirty-year period from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, Romani musicians modernized in order to serve their own communities in life-cycle celebrations, coped with paradoxes of Communist cultural control, and became the object of world music fads.The author, Carol Silverman, is a cultural anthropologist who has been researching Romani culture since the 1970s. She worked with Romani people in the United States and also conducted long-term research in Bulgaria and Macedonia. Her work has even extended to legal advocacy. Silverman is also an impresario and a performer of Balkan music. The ethnographic research for this book included participating in the life-cycle events of Romani households, observing and discussing music festivals and mass media as they relate to Romani people, assisting and observing the activities of Romani-rights NGOs that formed in the Balkans after 1989, conducting lengthy retrospective interviews with important Balkan Romani musicians, touring and performing with Balkan Romani musicians, observing European DJs, and discussing many issues with Romani interlocutors. In some chapters, Silverman explains politics of music-making that are local to Macedonia and Bulgaria. However, almost all of the musicians and Romani communities Silverman discusses have a transnational orientation, whether they have emigrated, concertized internationally, or experienced the change of national borders around them. The Romani ethnoscape thus extends to neighboring Balkan countries, Turkey, the United States, and Western Europe.Three introductory chapters explain the Romani communities, musicians, and countries covered in the book, provide a theoretical framework, and delineate key musical genres. Silverman discusses how theories of hybridity, diaspora, transnationalism, essentialism, and identity apply to Roma. Here she explores several aspects of contemporary identity formation, including the significance of Romani anthems and some activities of the Romani human rights movement since the 1990s. Silver - man outlines a conceptual framework developed for areas to the west and north such as Hungary, Russia, and France in order to explain some general issues concerning Romani music such as the fact that its originality has been questioned, that it is often virtuosic, that it can contain improvisation, and that it often has mesmerizing effects on non-Roma. She returns to a Balkan framework (specifying Ottoman and Turkish influence at many turns) to outline some basic genres of Balkan Romani performance. These include oboe and drum music; cocek/kyuchek music; a trend of modernizing urban ensembles starting with the calgiya idiom of the late Ottoman period; and outsiders' Orientalized, sexualized images of Romani women entertainers. Silverman also traces fashions within Balkan Romani communities from calgiya through Bulgarian wedding music, rap, and Kosovo Romani music.Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss Macedonian Romani households and life-cycle celebrations. Chapter 4 delineates how since the 1960s Macedonian Roma resettled in New York and other North American cities and since then have maintained extended family connections while dispersed between Macedonia, Western Europe, and the United States. Silverman stresses the key role of life-cycle ceremonies, especially weddings, in maintaining family ties. She argues that via communal viewing and discussion of home wedding videos, Roma constitute a transnational identity. Silver - man outlines a valuable fieldwork exchange: she sees women exercising significant power within Romani ceremonies and daily life, yet some of her female inter - locutors disagree with her. …

A Study on Domestic Activities of Raelian Movement

A Study on Domestic Activities of Raelian Movement

Late-stage Hydrocarbon Accumulation and Enrichment Pattern in Liaozhong Sag, Northern Offshore Bohai Bay Basin

The Liaozhong Sag is one of the major oil-bearing areas in offshore Bohai Bay Basin and is obviously characterized by late-stage hydrocarbon accumulation. In this paper our study was focused on strong activities of tectonic movement in the Liaozhong sag. In terms of source rock thermal history analysis, generation, migration and accumulation of hydrocarbon, late-stage hydrocarbon accumulation and enrichment pattern were summarized. Apatite fission track analysis and evolutionary history of the Easy% Ro model simulation of source rock showed that major source rocks became matured rapidly at the time 5.1Ma from the present. Fault analysis, showed that hydrocarbon migration in the study area was mainly the result of fault transportation. Fluid inclusions indicated that the accumulation period of oil and gas reservoirs was 5.1Ma from the present. Our study showed that late-stage rapid hydrocarbon generation, late-stage vertical fault transportation, hydrocarbon accumulation near source rocks and late-stage rapid in-filling are the main features of hydrocarbon accumulation in the Liaozhong Sag. The abnormal high pressure and fluid inclusion homogenization temperature anomaly are indications of late-stage episodic reservoiring and in-filling. Regional reservoir-cap rock combination of Eocene Shahejie Formation and Oligocene Dongying Formation, predominant transport channels and relevant traps formed by the complex tectonic movement of the Tan-Lu Fault are major factors controlling hydrocarbon accumulation. Episodic reservoiring of formation overpressure, near-source accumulation and fault control constitute the oil and gas enrichment pattern of the Liaozhong Sag.

Powers of action: locating agency in a post-apartheid redress campaign

This article examines the redress-centred campaigning activities of the Khulumani Support Group, a South African victim advocacy organization that has cultivated a specific form of agency through its demands for victim reparations. The article explores the efforts of this organization in a manner that pays attention to specific understandings of the power to act enabled by a Foucauldian perspective. More specifically, the article follows in the steps of recent scholarship emphasizing the productive or ‘positive’ dimensions of governmentality taking root in all areas of life and identifiable in the activities of social movements, grassroots organizations and other related groups.

Austrian Muslims. The problems and achievements of social and political integration

The national organization of Austrian Muslims in its first phase (1979–2000) was to improve dialogue between the state and Muslims, thereby making a contribution to the social integration of Muslims and their religious law and to social cohesion and so counteract social polarisation and segregation. Reality is more complicated: Muslims are not seen by others as part of Austrian society (right parties win up 18 to 30% by national and local elections) and their largest organizations are influenced by Turkish authorities or foreign fundamentalists. The construction of mosques and religious instruction at schools, supported by government as an important step towards the integration of Islam in Austria, can reach opposite goals, as the leaders of new Muslim’s political movements in Austria caution in mass-media. The activities of these new liberal movements can create a new scheme of Muslim-society cooperation and mutual understanding, in order to overcome irrational aggressive Islamophobia and sometimes reasonable Anti-Muslim prejudices.

Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (review)

Reviewed by: Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Dan Colson Barbara Foley . Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . Durham: Duke UP, 2010. xii + 448 pp. Nearly twenty years ago, Barbara Foley's seminal Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Literature, 1929-1941 reshaped the way we read radical fiction. Along with Cary Nelson, Alan Wald, and a handful of others, Foley helped instantiate "radical literature" as a valid and rich—albeit still marginal—area of study. By [End Page 161] offering both a functional definition of and extensive taxonomy for proletarian literature, Radical Representations crystalized the often-fragmented field, providing a touchstone for subsequent studies of radical fiction. Two decades later, Foley's latest effort, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, is perhaps even more ambitious. In it, she takes on not a collection of little-known and marginally canonical works that typically comprise "radical literature," but one of the most studied twentieth-century novels. Foley continues her critical fascination with literary Leftism, yet Wrestling with the Left holds value for all students and scholars of Ellison, African American literature, and literary modernism, demonstrating the far-reaching impact of the twentieth-century American Left and the continued importance of politically engaged scholarship. As Foley consistently reminds us, the popular reading of Invisible Man finds its genesis in the contemporaneous New Critical reception of the novel and in Ellison's self-aware construction of his intentions. While retaining the critique of American racism, he stripped the novel of any overt involvement in the post-World War II ideological battle and, after its publication, sought to avoid being "branded a 'Negro writer'" by claiming literary kinship with Shakespeare, Virgil, Aeschylus, Herman Melville, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot (69). In part a reaction to the political exigencies of the Cold War and in part literary self-fashioning, Ellison's insistence that the book owed a great debt to classical mythology, Freudian criticism, Burkean rhetorical theory, and high modernism—while ignoring and denying any impact by his earlier dalliance with the Left—established parameters for the analysis of his novel that were consonant with the predominant political and aesthetic sensibilities of the era and that have lingered for more than fifty years. Wrestling with the Left is designed to correct this narrow perspective, not by denying Ellison's claimed influences, but by detailing Ellison's engagement with Left political discourse throughout his career, thus adding the Left as an ambivalent opponent that complicates and informs earlier readings of Invisible Man. Foley adds this layer of content/context in two ways: in Part I, she analyzes previously unknown and severely understudied works that reveal Ellison's explicit involvement with Leftist literary magazines, his attraction to Marxian political philosophy, and his praise for others writing from Leftist perspectives. Wrestling with the Left does not portray Ellison as an uncritical champion of pre-World War II communism, thus avoiding the prototypical, pre-war Leftist, Cold War conservative trajectory of rejection of many 1930s radicals. Instead, Foley produces a shifting snapshot of a writer drawn to the Left, yet profoundly troubled by the American Communist Party's and [End Page 162] the international communist movement's actions vis-à-vis race as anti-fascism changed strategies and Black Americans were asked to make difficult (perhaps untenable) wartime sacrifices. Part I argues that Ellison's intellectual engagement with the Left—with proletarian fiction, with left-leaning anthropologist Stanley Edgar Hymen, and with Richard Wright (who himself struggled to address cohesively the intersection of race and Left politics)—structured political and aesthetic stances that are a necessary prehistory to Invisible Man. Only through the type of careful attention to Ellison's early writing that we find in Wrestling with the Left can we come to terms with the content and the absences of his magnum opus. Part II then builds from this foundation with an exhaustive reading of Invisible Man. Foley's extensive analysis weaves together the novel as it was published in 1952 with the large number of available excerpts, rewrites, and revisions that show a...

Industry arrangements for oil spill preparedness

In the post-Montara/Macondo world, the Australian petroleum industry has been actively represented on various working groups focused on the prevention, preparedness and response to significant oil spill incidents. Through the Australian Marine Oil Spill Centre (AMOSC) based in Geelong, Victoria, cooperation and coordination with other international associations has been occurring to ensure ‘reasonable steps’ are taken to develop preparedness and response arrangements commensurate with the risks associated with industry activities.Concurrently and here in Australia, a thorough review of the National Plan has allowed industry to work with government to develop or amend a range of initiatives aimed at ensuring that industry and government strategies are integrated for maximum efficiency in all circumstances. The scene has been set by a reviewed national risk assessment focusing on all activities of hydrocarbon movement around the Australian coastline. So what has Australian industry actually achieved post-Montara in prevention, preparedness and response to oil spills? This extended abstract shares and explains the practical outcomes of the industry initiatives of oil spills in Australia. The outcomes are planning requirements, equipment location, mutual aid arrangements, training programs and the extended services of industry oil spill response organisations in Australia and overseas.

Work and Neoliberal Globalization: A Polanyian Synthesis

This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization’s impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while others mobilize a transnational civil society. Research we review generally points to liabilities of neoliberal globalization for workers. To understand these findings, we apply Karl Polanyi’s concepts of fictitious commodities, the self-regulating market, and the double movement. We propose that, on the one hand, the activities of MNCs, international financial organizations, and many states exemplify pushes for institutional separation of economy and society in effort to institutionalize the idea of a self-regulating market at a global scale, which increases labor commodification and global inequalities. On the other hand, the activities of social movements, including unions and transnational actors that target globalization’s impact on work, constitute the counter movement at national and global levels resisting marketization and pushing for labor decommodification. The aftermath of the ongoing economic crisis will tell to what extent this countermovement will be successful in generating an alternative to neoliberal globalization, and more protections for workers.

Russia’s Contemporary Environmental Movement

Laura Henry's book, Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia, explores the evolution of Russia's environmental movement post-1991. It is grounded on extensive interviews and associated fieldwork activity in various regions of Russia. The main empirical focus of the book encompasses the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s. The book is a welcome addition to the existing literature in this area, helping to confirm, as well as augment, current understanding via a detailed analysis of environmental activism in Russia. More specifically, the book's findings build purposefully on the earlier work of authors exploring the nature and character of environmental movements and related democratic trends following the fall of socialist regimes in 1989/1991 (e.g., Fagan and Jehlicka 2003). In view of the size and significance of Russia as a global environmental actor, there has been relatively limited critical engagement with the country's environmental movement in the Western literature post-1991. Exceptions include the historical work of Mirovitskaya (1998), the earlier work of Henry (2006), in addition to regional work by Crotty (2003) and, more recently, chapters by Henry and Metzo in the edited collection by Julian Agyeman and Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger. Furthermore, the work of the Russian sociologist, Oleg Yanitsky, has provided significant and influential insight from the Russian perspective (e.g., Yanitsky 1999, 2001). In general, this body of work captured the emergence and protracted reconfiguration of Russia's environmental movement during the uncertainties of the 1990s and early 2000s. Henry's monograph is particularly useful in developing the findings of this literature in order to establish an understanding of both national and regional trends within Russia. The analytical and empirical focus of the work is strengthened further by its specific engagement with a period of growing state antipathy towards the activities of independent social movements; a trend that was particularly marked in the case of environmental organisations.

Cracking Hegemony in Thailand: Gramsci, Bourdieu and the Dialectics of Rebellion

Gramsci's notion of “hegemony,” like Bourdieu's concept of “habitus,” seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions of “hegemony” and “habitus” inscribe the possibility of resistance within the embodied experience of accommodation to class rule. I then elaborate a dialectical, Gramscian-Bourdieusian account of the Red Shirt movement in Thailand, showing that the seeds for the destruction of royalist hegemony in Thailand have been sown in the embodied processes of accommodation to ruling class hegemony. The breadth and depth of challenges to this hegemony, moreover, are evident not only from the activities of the Red Shirt movement and regional discontent in Northern and Northeast Thailand but from the resistance of working class women to attempts to police their sexuality and limit their consumerism. The refusal of Thai elites to accept the breadth and depth of Thailand's dispositional transformation has legitimised – in their eyes – the brutal crackdown on Red Shirt protestors that resulted in the April-May 2010 massacres. Yet repression can only kill off political leaders and specific parties; it will not likely derail the growing resentment of ordinary Thais over elitist class rule.

Energy Security: The Planetary Fulfillment of the Enclosure Movement

This essay examines the transformation in land relations known as the enclosure movement that paralleled the rise of the British Empire. It reveals this transformation to be a major motivator in today's cultural and political orientations toward the environment, and toward land relations in general. It argues that the ontology of enclosure has continued to spread in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to geographical locations formerly connected to British and European colonial expansion, adversely affecting the struggles of today's agricultural communities. The major manifestation of the enclosing ontology appears in the trope of “energy security,” a term meant to justify the enclosure of third world agricultural spaces for the future development of presumably green-friendly plant alternatives to oil. The essay also explores the activities of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) and its alternative relationship to the land. It concludes with an admonitory statement about the future viability of the geopolitics of enclosure.

Negotiating place, space and borders: The New Sanctuary Movement

This article examines immigration and immigrant rights through the activities of the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM). The NSM, which is led by religious activists, responds to the contradiction between the basic principles of freedom that have theoretically grounded the American political system and the practices that have allowed for the current measures taken against immigrants. This article employs narratives from NSM supporters, stories from undocumented individuals in sanctuary, and scholarly work to illustrate how the NSM works as a channel for mobilization and articulation of demands of supportive religious and political activists who seek comprehensive immigration reform, as well as providing sanctuary places for undocumented immigrants faced with deportation. The NSM in Ventura County, Los Angeles County and San Francisco, California, are used as case studies to conclude that the NSM has been effective in creating and taking advantage of political opportunities to improve public policies and immigrants’ ability to negotiate local, state and national political structures.

Liberating Women with Islam? The Islamists and Women's Issues in Jordan

The question of where Jordanian Islamists stand on women's rights has generated a great deal of attention over the past few years. An analysis of recent shifts in gender relations and hierarchies within the Jordanian Islamic movement (namely the Muslim Brothers and their political wing the Islamic Action Front and the Islamic Centrist Party) reveals that over the past three decades their views on women's rights have shifted towards embracing a much wider and more visible participation of women in the public space and within the movement itself. This suggests that engaging Islamists in political processes helps a great deal in ‘detraditionalizing’ them. However, since 2003, the women's movement, supported by the Jordanian government, has aggressively promoted a CEDAW‐based discourse on rights that has challenged the Islamists to develop a more explicit discourse on women's rights. The new discourse is distinct in being promoted by women as well as men of the movement. This discourse is not entirely consistent with the above‐stated shifts and reveals a rejection of the body of rights suggested by CEDAW. Our analysis of the reaction to the CEDAW‐based discourse on women's rights shows that the Islamists base their opposition to CEDAW on an argument which states that Islam is concerned with justice rather than equality, yet this argument has not been consistently applied across a number of different issue areas, undermining the position of Islamists with regard to women's rights. The overall conclusion of the analysis is that definite change has occurred with regard to the role and status of women in Jordanian society through the activities of the women's movement and efforts to politically engage Islamists on this issue. Yet these changes remain precarious, as the views of Islamist political parties continue to border on traditionalism.

Made in Lebanon: Local Participation and Indigenous Responses to Development and Post-war Reconstruction

Based on fieldwork and using two case studies from contemporary Lebanon, this article critically appraises indigenous responses to under-development and post-war reconstruction. Indigenous initiatives and methods have become popular among international organisations and international non-governmental organisations in development and reconstruction activities. There is a danger, however, in over-romanticising these approaches. While they hold advantages, they also hold potential risks, especially in the context of a deeply divided society. The article draws on the Waad initiative in Beirut's southern suburbs and the activities of the Future Movement in Tripoli to assess the usefulness of indigenous responses to reconstruction. After outlining the cases, four issues are discussed: the politicisation of indigenous assistance in deeply divided societies; the extent to which indigenous approaches to reconstruction can be participatory; the extent to which internationally-supported indigenous assistance can be usefully labelled as ‘indigenous’; and the ability of non-state social actors to reinforce or undermine the state. Although drawing on Lebanese examples, it is hoped that the issues raised have relevance to other cases (especially in deeply divided societies) and connect with policy debates on the desirability of indigenous responses to reconstruction and development challenges.

Assessing How Far Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Coalition Influenced Voting System Reform in Britain

Lead in large part by Charter 88 and the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the activities of the constitutional reform movement since the early 1990s have clearly helped to introduce new proportional voting systems into UK politics. Yet, at the same time, the Labour governments after 1997decisively rejected voting reform for the House of Commons and dragged out Lords reform to prevent any direct election of a second chamber. To explore how Charter 88 and other groups influenced this process I first examine and critique the conventional wisdom that the reform movement’s influence had minimal influence, as expressed by Anthony King’s 2007 book, The British Constitution. Second, to illuminate the processes that King leaves so obscure, I chart three critical games played largely inside the Labour party from 1994 to 2003: – the pre-election game that lead to Blair’s initial pledge of a referendum on voting reform; – the ‘new institutions’ game that produced a welter of new proportional voting systems everywhere else but Westminster; and – the post-landslide game that lead to Labour reneging on the voting system referendum pledge, plus taking no action on Commons or Lords electoral reform. Despite these latter setbacks a large-scale transition of UK voting systems has already taken place. British voters are increasingly used to proportional representation and the defence of plurality rule is intellectually dead (as the weaknesses of King’s analysis inadvertently demonstrate). So the overall story is one of unprecedented success for electoral reformers, of a piece with the ineluctable transition to complex multi-party systems across all the nations and regions of the UK.

Radio Syntheses

Radio Syntheses Marinetti's experiments with recorded sound begin in 1914 with a series of recordings of poetic recitations carried out in a London recording studio. His interest in the medium of radio dates back to Futurism's beginnings but starts carrying over into the realm of practice in the mid to late 1920s. During his 1926 tour of South America, Marinetti makes repeated appearances on Brazilian and Argentine radio stations. These are followed by sixteen years of active collaboration with the Italian national radio (the EIAR), founded in 1928, which involve everything from declaiming aeropoems, to serving as a live action commentator of major events like the August 1932 return from the United States of Italo Balbo's flying squadron, to hosting a regularly broadcast radio bulletin on the activities of the futurist movement. In 1931, he participates in an important debate on radio and radio drama organized by the review Il convegno (12.7–8), along with Massimo Bontempelli, Silvio d'Amico, and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. At the end of the same year he and Mino Somenzi publish their manifesto Il teatro aereo radiotelevisivo, followed by the publication in September 1932 of Il manifesto della radio futurista, co-authored with Pino Masnata. The following five radio syntheses date from this period of intense reflection on the expressive potential of radio, even though they were only published ten years later in Autori e scrittori 6.8 (Aug. 1941), accompanied by a reprinting of the second manifesto and by eight other radio syntheses by Masnata. [End Page 415] An Acoustical Landscape, and: Drama of distances, and: Silences speak among themselves, and: Battle of Rhythms, and: Building a Silence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Jeffrey Schnapp Translated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp An Acoustical Landscape The whistle of a blackbird envious of the fire's crackle ended up putting out the water's whispery gossip 10 seconds of lapping. 1 second of crackling. 8 seconds of lapping. 1 second of crackling. 5 seconds of lapping. 1 second of crackling. 19 seconds of lapping. 1 second of crackling. 25 seconds of lapping. 1 second of crackling. 35 seconds of lapping. 6 seconds of blackbird whistling. [End Page 416] Drama of distances 11 seconds a military march in Rome. 11 seconds a tango being danced in Santos. 11 seconds of Japanese religious music being played in Tokyo. 11 seconds of a lively rustic dance in the Varese countryside. 11 seconds of a boxing match in New York. 11 seconds of street noise in Milan. 11 seconds of a Neapolitan love song sung in the Copacabana Hotel in Rio de Janeiro. [End Page 417] Silences speak among themselves 15 seconds of pure silence. A flute's do re mi. 8 seconds of pure silence. A flute's do re mi. 29 seconds of pure silence. A piano's sol. A trumpet's do. 40 seconds of pure silence. A trumpet's do. An infant's wah wah. 11 seconds of pure silence. An eleven year old girl's stupefied ooooh. [End Page 418] Battle of Rhythms A prudent and patient slowness expressed by means of the tap tap tap of water drops first cut off then killed off by A flying elasticity composed of arpeggios of piano notes first cut off then killed off by A loud ringing of an electric doorbell first cut off and then killed off by A three minute long silence first cut off and then killed off by A toiling key in lock tat rum ta trac followed by A one minute long silence. [End Page 419] Building a Silence 1. Build a wall on the left with a drum roll (one half minute) 2. Build a wall on the right with trumpeting – shouting – auto tram a squealing of capital (one half minute) 3. Build a floor with the gurgling of water in pipes (one half minute) 4. Build a ceiling terrace with the chip chip srschip of sparrows and swallows (20 seconds) [End Page 420] Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Cultural Revolution in Iran, with Close Regard to the Universities, and its Impact on the Student Movement

The cultural revolution (1980–83), has been regarded by the elite in Iran as one major step towards the establishment of Islamic values in the universities. Twenty-eight years after those events, the elite in Iran are still struggling to implement their policies effectively in universities. The sudden rise in the political activities of the student movement during Mohammad Khatami's presidency (1997–2005) was in many ways a disappointing development for those who had initiated the cultural revolution. There was a general feeling that under the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad (2005–present), the student movement activities would decline. However, this has not been the case. The new upsurge in the activities of the student movement in Iran has raised a significant question: why has there been a revival in these activities under a more conservative social and political order? This article attempts to examine this central issue by re-examining the events that contributed to the rise and resistance to the cultural revolution. This article will also discuss contemporary materials and will highlight a number of different issues which will shed new light on the understanding of this topical subject.

Art, Nationalism and War: Political Futurism in Italy (1909–1944)

AbstractFuturism was launched as a revolutionary, iconoclastic movement encompassing the arts, politics and society. It rejected all ties with the past and preached with missionary zeal the advent of a new man and the total reconstruction of society. Despite its powerful impact on Italian politics, the importance of Futurism has scarcely been addressed in the social sciences. Yet, it continues to attract the interest of historians, literary critics and art historians. In fact, the major methodological hindrance for a more articulated research remains the latter's unchallenged hegemony, with their selective propensity to eulogistic accounts. The result is the neglect of Futurism's political dimension as a fully fledged nationalist movement. Aiming to redress this imbalance, the article analyzes Futurist politics through the movement's actions, proclaims and manifestos. It distinguishes early Futurism's anti‐establishment ultra‐nationalism (1909–1915) from the more institutionalized ‘muscular’ patriotism adopted after its merger with Fascism (1924–1944). In a global context of mounting nationalist state‐building and spiralling inter‐state rivalries, Italy's unitary, homogenizing nationalism provided a congenial matrix for the advent of war‐mongering patriotism and irredentism. Here, Futurism found an ideal structure of political opportunities, in which it could articulate its unique repertoire of action. The futurists’ peculiar talent in ‘manufacturing consent’ through the media was put to test in their marketing of war as adventurous boundary‐building enterprise, a vision subsequently appropriated by Fascism.