Global Protest Research Articles

Black insurgent aesthetics and the public imaginary

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the spontaneous production of graffiti art and murals covering the entrances of businesses in the central business district of Oakland, CA, in the wake of the global protest movements, in 2020, against state violence and systemic racism. I argue that the art made legible what gets hidden through the violent processes of gentrification, neoliberal urbanism, and displacement/dispossession. The paper rethinks what borders, policing, and reclamation mean in a time of economic instability and a global health crisis, through the placement of these vernacular expressions in Downtown Oakland. What is revealed through the art is the convergence of two co-constitutive publics – a segregated, decaying city mostly inhabited by poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents and laborers, and a modern, prosperous, neoliberal city that caters to a privileged class of white residents and tourists – especially as the city grappled with the management and regulation of public space in the midst of a global pandemic. The article thus theorizes public space as layered and always contested, and not simply a space of conflict but also collective engagement.

Contributing Authors

Say Burgin is assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. Her publications have appeared in the Women's History Review, Journal of American Studies, Journal of International Women's Studies, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her first book project examines the myth that Black Power was “antiwhite” and the white fight for Black Power in Detroit. Say was a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. She also co-created the educational website Rosa Parks's Biography: A Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks (https://rosaparksbiography.org/). Follow her on Twitter @sayburgin.Robert T. Chase is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. His research and teaching interests include the history of mass incarceration and the construction of what historians call “the carceral state.” He is also the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery (HAS). He is an expert in social justice, Latino/a, and civil rights movements, and political and African American history. He is the editor of the book Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (2019). His book We are Not Slaves won the Best Book Award from the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology; the Hank Lacayo Best Labor-Themed Award from the International Latino Book Award; and honorable mention for the Betty and Alfred Lee McClung Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.Simon Hall is professor of modern history at the University of Leeds, where his research and teaching focus on the civil rights–Black Power movements, the student radicalism of the long 1960s, and global protest during the Cold War. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt (2016) and Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (2005).Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021-22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.

Cultural Critique

Cultural Critique Cesare Casarino, Maggie Hennefeld, John Mowitt, and Simona Sawhney In the dark times, will there also be singing?Yes, there will also be singing, about the dark times. —Bertolt Brecht When in her Lessing Prize speech Hannah Arendt recycled Brecht's figure of "dark times" she was not thinking of the COVID-19 pandemic that has been ravaging "humanity" since the spring of 2019. How could she? We, however, cannot help but think of it. It has imposed a new darkness on our times. As Brecht predicted, there has been singing and, as always, it has taken many forms: global protests against environmental destruction, pandemic racism, and corporate autocracy, for example. For the senior editorial team at Cultural Critique the singing has taken collegial form. In fall of this year we welcomed a new senior editor to the journal, Professor Frieda Ekotto, a "song" whose qualities resemble those that hover over and between Yaoundé, Fort de France, and New Orleans. Frieda, who will serve as president of the Modern Language Association in 2023, comes to us from the University of Michigan where she is professor of Afroamerican and African Literature, Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a dozen books, including Race and Sex across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical, and Theater Discourse (2011), Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, which was translated by Corine Tachtiris (2019). She is the coeditor of Rethinking African Cultural Production (2015) and Rethinking Third Cinema: The Role of Anti-colonial Media and Aesthetics in Postmodernity (2009). She has appeared in a documentary on the Hmong communities in the U.S. and is the producer of two feature films. Other forms of "illumination" are in hand. [End Page vii] Long ago Frieda completed a doctorate at Minnesota, so in a sense she is circling back through home. We have heard her approaching and are thrilled to be here to greet her. Bienvenue, Frieda. [End Page viii] Cesare Casarino, Maggie Hennefeld, John Mowitt, and Simona Sawhney The Senior Editorial Group Copyright © 2022 Regents of the University of Minnesota

Doing the right thing? value conflicts and community policing

ABSTRACT Research on police legitimacy and public confidence underlines the importance of the police demonstrating moral alignment with the communities they serve. However, less attention is given to conflict between values, either within communities or between communities and the police. This study explores value conflicts in community or neighbourhood policing from a perspective of political realism, which suggests that such conflicts are inevitable and can only be resolved in temporary and contingent ways. It does so through a case study of neighbourhood policing, seen through local ward panel meetings, in one London borough. In total, 33 semi-structured interviews with 43 participants were undertaken, and seven hours of observations. This paper identifies four value-based conflicts that emerged through the meetings, and shows how neighbourhood police officers were able to provisionally resolve them, thus supporting confidence and legitimacy. However, it also shows how austerity has put this capacity at risk, both operationally, and through a receding of confidence as an organisational priority, with potential long-term consequences for public confidence in the police. With global protests such as Black Lives Matters, and anti-lockdown demonstrations, underlining the importance of public confidence and legitimacy to police organisations across the world, this paper adds to the evidence on the capacity of community policing to support this, offers a new perspective to understand the role of values in policing, and discusses the policy implications.

Teaching Justice in Health Care

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Ethics CornerFull AccessTeaching Justice in Health CareCharles C. Dike, M.D., M.P.H.Charles C. DikeSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H.Published Online:29 Mar 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.04.4.34“I will keep them [the sick] from harm and injustice. … Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves. …” —Hippocratic Oath, 400 B.C.This well-known pledge, the foundation of medical ethics, is repeated in one form or another by graduating medical students as they take on the sacred privilege of caring for others. Out of it flows the ethical injunctions of beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. As a graduating physician, I did not fully comprehend the sophistication of this age-old oath. It was easy enough to understand that the goal of treatment was to make patients better and cause no harm. But what exactly is “justice” in the field of medicine? Some have understood it to mean equitable distribution of available resources while providing care for our patients. Or being just or fair in the treatment of patients.Physicians are quick to state that their actions in therapeutic contexts are in the best interest of their patients, and they try their best to avoid harm. Physicians cannot, however, lay the same claim to justice. African Americans and other people of color have often borne the brunt of unjust physician practices. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed what has historically been the experience of people of color—that is, White patients are prioritized over Black patients. There were reports that Black patients did not have widespread access to COVID tests and were passed over for being placed on a ventilator or an EMCO despite having similar clinical presentations. In psychiatry, Black patients are more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic illness even when the symptoms suggest otherwise, given intramuscular antipsychotic medications, and mechanically restrained, to mention only a few inequities, than their White peers.The public and gruesome killing of George Floyd and subsequent global protests led to a long-delayed awakening. Suddenly physician groups began to profess an awareness of the inherent injustice of the U.S. health care system and of their historical maltreatment of their non-White physician colleagues. Dr. Jeffrey Geller, former president of APA, convened the Task Force on Structural Racism Throughout Psychiatry to study the issue in depth, educate the public, and make amends. The APA Ethics Committee gave an opinion thus: “To provide competent care, a psychiatrist should cultivate an awareness of the adverse effects on mental health that result from racism and ethnoracial discrimination. … A treating psychiatrist should be mindful of the impact that racism and ethnoracial and other kinds of discrimination may have in the lives of patients and their families, in clinical encounters, and in the development of mental health services. ...”Despite the apparent awakening, psychiatry residents’ training on social (health care) justice remains sorely lacking. Concerned by this reality in their residency programs, several APA/APAF fellows took on the challenge and, under the auspices of the task force’s Workgroup on Fellow Projects and Leadership, created “A Primer of Online Resources on Structural Racism in Psychiatry for Medical Students & Trainees in Psychiatry.”The effort to educate our residents will flounder without sustained attention at developing a formal and structured educational process in residency programs. Equal attention should be placed on training faculty, not just faculty of color, to teach this material. Combating injustice in our health care system requires all hands to be on deck. Future physicians and psychiatrists—and their patients—deserve no less. We should hold ourselves accountable to all the elements of our code of ethics: beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy (respect for persons), and, yes, justice. ■APA’s ethics opinions related to COVID-19 is posted here.“A Primer of Online Resources on Structural Racism in Psychiatry for Medical Students & Trainees in Psychiatry” is posted here.Charles C. Dike, M.D., M.P.H., is chair of the APA Ethics Committee and former chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. He is also an associate professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Law and Psychiatry Division at the Yale University School of Medicine. ISSUES NewArchived

Egypt's Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics

Carl Rommel, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, has written an intriguing anthropological study on Egyptian football and politics set against the background of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Using media analysis, interviews, and fieldwork, this study reveals how prevailing political and emotional attitudes toward the game changed after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's fall. Rommel's central argument revolves around what he refers to as an “emotionally charged and highly politicized ‘bubble’” (2): the intertwining of Egyptian football with the Mubarak family's political agenda, with hegemonic masculinity, and with an outpouring of uncontrolled emotion. When the regime fell and the bubble burst, Rommel claims, images of the game were transformed and stigmatized due to fear of the game's ability to produce extreme emotions that could be cynically exploited for political ends that do not benefit the people (siyasa).This thought-provoking argument is written in a clear and engaging style that will appeal to scholars from various disciplines. As the book's title and subtitle inform us, Rommel's narrative intersects several fields of study, yet the monograph's main theme is primarily directed to modern Egypt and Middle East scholars. Egypt's Football Revolution is an important addition to the recent wave of sports publications on the Middle East and the ever-growing literature that uses sport as a fruitful lens through which to examine social and cultural issues. Sport historians, in particular, will be interested by the study's claim that the emotions generated by sport are a product of politics.The book is primarily based on fifty interviews Rommel conducted in Egypt during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, picky readers (mostly historians) will need to adjust themselves to sentences that start with: “When I have asked friends” (49) and “I often heard” (215). However, when the narrative forces Rommel outside of his interview-based comfort zone, his work becomes, as he stated, more “methodologically eclectic” (21). Such integration is especially clear in the first two chapters, which focus on the football bubble during the Mubarak regime. The lack of contemporary interviews compels Rommel to do some “real” historical research. But the selection of the newspaper articles, TV appearances, and other media sources is relatively scant. Moreover, the narrative decision to fluidly shift from examining “historical sources” to post-2011 interviews can sometimes lead to a messy integration of “history” and “memory.” In itself, this overlap is hardly problematic. As numerous postmodern scholars have convincingly shown, history and memory are connected by an intimate and reciprocal relationship. Nevertheless, if Rommel's thesis is correct and an emotional change toward the game indeed occurred after the uprising, the post-uprising interviews on their own can only indicate an altered perspective on the old regime's culture and not, as the book implies, provide definitive evidence of the existence of such a “bubble” during the Mubarak era.One element that might have further enriched and strengthened the book's argument is incorporating a more transnational perspective. For example, early in the text, when attempting to establish the connection between football and Egyptian nationalism, Rommel informs the readers that already in the interwar period “the team's performances in those [international] tournaments were followed with great anxiety among what was then an emerging national public” (7). That might be correct, but as the extensive work on the 1920s and ’30s has repeatedly shown, such a claim could easily describe many cultures in this pre–World War II era and their fear of “degeneration.” Similarly, Rommel argues that the revolution failed because of Egyptian politics’ inability to conform with the imagined needs of the nation. As he rhetorically asks in his conclusion, “If all actors striving to effect change are required to remain nationalist and nonpolitical, then what kind of changes are possible at all” (217)? However, this sort of political toothlessness is not exclusive to the Egyptian uprising, and it also describes to some extent the disillusionment of Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 global protests in general. Moreover, a more cynical reader might even say the story of contemporary Egyptian football is less about revolution, emotions, and bubbles and more about a winning team that was beloved by the people and the regime and a relatively mediocre team that is unable to repeat its predecessor's three consecutive wins in the Africa Cup of Nations.Despite these issues, the book is a welcome addition to scholarship on sport and society. The diverse themes and thought-provoking thesis make the study a fruitful object for future debates, and it is a must for scholars and graduate students of sport in the middle east.

The Sound of Poetry and the Polis: Translation and Noise in María Salgado’s Hacía un ruido

María Salgado’s Hacía un ruido: frases para un film político (2016) was advertised as being linked to the global protests triggered by the early twenty-first-century financial and socio-political crisis. Critics read it as being endowed with referential and representational clarity, as well as an identifiable sense of political dissent. Yet references to politics in this poetry book are obfuscated by a translation that points to a textual limit to political representation. Hacía un ruido can be read as being informed by a poetics of translation that invites long-standing questions about the location of poetry vis-à-vis the language of the polis.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts Are Organizational Change Management Efforts.

The year 2020 was an awakening into the racial disparities that exist across the United States and within health care. Global protests after the murder of George Floyd were a poignant recognition of the disproportionate—and often deadly—burden for those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Systemic inequalities within our health system are well documented. From birth to death, BIPOC Americans experience poorer health outcomes than White Americans. For example, Black women have lower screening mammography rates than White women [1], which contributes to higher mortality rates due to higher-grade malignancies and later-stage diagnoses.

Tech Companies and Social Justice: The Pandemic Race for Diversity, Access and Inclusion Moves Online

The year, 2020, was a wakeup call to corporate America to make unprecedented progress on diversity and inclusion, with the Covid-19 crisis exposing astronomical racial health disparities, and the murder of George Floyd, prompting global protests against racism. The reckoning over race in the U.S. prompted a growing number of leaders to adopt a moral case for communicating a stronger commitment to diversity, but stakeholders are demanding to see real change. The purpose of this study is to outline the actions that CEOs are taking to communicate about diversity commitment and accountability as defined by the literature, among tech organizations, making the Diversity Inc. 2021 Top 50 Companies for Diversity list. A qualitative content analysis of CEO diversity statements publicly published by four tech companies cited for ‘diversity,’ identifies leadership diversity actions as building trust, actively working against discrimination and subordination, embracing a wide range of styles and voice, and making cultural differences a resource for learning. These CEO statements were coded for moral legitimacy or the lack thereof. The author found symbolic evidence of moral legitimacy, four leadership perspectives on behavioral change and cultural shift, as well as, similarities and differences in communication practices. These findings will help practitioners craft diversity statements that offer substantive expressions of inclusive actions.

Diaspora formation and mobilisation: The emerging Hong Kong diaspora in the anti‐extradition bill movement

AbstractOver the years, literature studying stateless diaspora formation through a transborder social movement studies approach is growing. The recent rise of Hong Kong diaspora provides an emerging case of stateless diaspora that introduces new empirical insights into the scholarly literature. Using a mixed‐method research strategy, this study empirically investigates the formation of the Hong Kong diaspora as a ‘historically contingent process’, through which overseas Hongkongers were mobilised during the 2019–20 Anti‐Extradition Bill Movement (critical event) to join global protests (mobilising practices) by diaspora groups and activists (mobilising agents). Achieved transborder outreach across the Global North by mobilising their strong moral and cultural resources, it remains to be seen whether the emerging Hong Kong diaspora will move towards a full‐fledged, sustained identity‐based movement. The case study of Hong Kong diaspora offers new comparative insights and establishes a mixed‐method analytical framework for comparing stateless diaspora worldwide.

The Age of Popular Protests

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine the difference between the global protests, which have increased unexpectedly in the last decade, from the global protests in the past. In this way, it is to show the main points between the global protests and to reveal how the mass demonstrations taking place around the world have changed numerically and regionally.
 Design/Methodology: In the research, qualitative and quantitative research methods were used and the global protests that took place around the world, especially the developments that took place in the last ten years, were supported by graphics and maps. This study is a research article and literature review technique was used. 
 Findings: While every mass protest over the past decade has its own context, these global mass protests are based on common grievances such as economic hardship, ineffective governance, political crisis, ethnic and religious discrimination, and corruption. The interesting thing is that while our world is witnessing new technological inventions and discoveries every day, this dissatisfaction is increasing. At this point, not only the number of countries where these mass demonstrations took place has increased significantly in the last ten years, but also the number of participants in these demonstrations is increasing day by day. In addition, mass demonstrations are increasing not only in underdeveloped countries but also in developed and developing countries.
 Limitations: The study examines the developments of the global protests that occurred around the world in the 10-year period between 2009-2019. In addition, it tries to examine the similarities between the protests from a global perspective by aiming to explain the global protests that took place in general.
 Originality/Value: The originality of the research is that it examines the development of global protests, especially taking into account the last ten years, and tries to explain the difference between these protests and global protests in the past. In addition, the study tries to support the arguments it defends with graphics and maps obtained from statistical data.

When Art Becomes Liberty

The 2015 Egyptian Surrealists in Global Perspective conference, and the companion 2016 exhibition When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938–1965), both held in Cairo, Egypt, explored the history and evolution of the work of Egyptian surrealists and their remarkable legacy within Egypt and in international surrealist circles. This article serves as a preview of contributions to this special issue of Nka, which serves as a followup to these two events, documenting the relationship of the Egyptian surrealists with Western counterparts, especially the French surrealists, and their contributions to internationalism, antifascist global protest, and decolonization, staged and performed outside the West. The artistic and intellectual output of the Egyptian surrealists was primarily centered around activities initiated by the Art and Liberty group (Jama’at al-Fann Wa al-Hurriyyah), the Contemporary Art Group (Jama’at al-Fann al-Mu’asir), and the artists who exhibited with one or both of these groups. In addition to more traditional artistic genres, photography played an important role in the surrealists’ artistic practices of the time, as is examined in this issue. This introduction, and the contributions to this issue of Nka that it surveys, affirm that the Egyptian surrealists, among other non-Western modernists, represent the multifaceted aspects of modernity and its global interconnectedness in the twentieth century. The strength of the Egyptian surrealists lay squarely in their theoretical underpinning that emphasized non-Western modernism, not as derivative or secondary to the Western modernism, but as a unique experiment in modernity that is worthy of its own investigation.

Too much policing: Why calls are made to defund the police

The repeat use of fatal force against unarmed people of color has driven global protests against police violence and fueled criticism of policing as a mechanism for public safety. In the US, calls to abolish, transform, or reform policing have reemerged with a primary focus on the elimination of structural racism. In this essay, we contend that a two-tier policing problem exists. The first is the continued use of policing to enforce racial dominance through policing practices labeled as “proactive”. The second is contemporary “warrior-style” police training that normalizes the expectation of unquestioned compliance with police directives and authorizes police to use physical force in its absence. This dangerous combination results in over-policing the public generally and Black members of the public specifically. Select incidents are provided to support these claims. We conclude by expressing support for the call to reallocate portions of policing budgets toward other government and community-based structures that function to enhance the ability of people to survive and thrive rather than operate as mechanisms of pre-adjudication punishment and state-sanctioned coercion.

Applying a Transformative Justice Approach to Encourage the Participation of Black and Latina Girls in Computing

Global protests and civil unrest in 2020 has renewed the world’s interest in addressing injustice due to structural racism and oppression toward Black and Latinx people in all aspects of society, including computing. In this article, we argue that to address and repair the harm created by institutions, policies, and practices that have systematically excluded Black and Latina girls from computer science, an intersectional, transformative justice approach must be taken. Leveraging testimonial authority, we share our past 8 years of experience designing, implementing, and studying Digital Youth Divas, a programmatic and systemic approach to encouraging middle school Black and Latina girls to participate in STEM. Specifically, we propose three principles to counter structural racism and oppression embedded in society and computing education: computing education must (1) address local histories of injustice by engaging community members; (2) counter negative stereotypes perpetuated in computer science by creating inclusive safe spaces and counter-narratives; and (3) build sustainable, computational capacity in communities. To illustrate each principle, we provide specific examples of the harm created by racist policies and systems and their effect on a specific community. We then describe our attempt to create counter structures and the subsequent outcomes for the girls, their families, and the community. This work contributes a framework for STEM and computing educators to integrate transformative justice as a method of repairing the harm that both society and the field of computing has and continues to cause Black and Latinx communities. We charge policy makers, educators, researchers, and community leaders to examine histories of oppression in their communities and to adopt holistic, transformative approaches that counter structural oppression at the individual and system level.

Pragmatic White Allyship for Higher Education Popular Music Academics

The world watched the killing of George Floyd from a position of COVID induced captivation. The succeeding global protests and Black Lives Matter movement justly prompted us all to consider our own complicity with the modes of systemic racism which have normalized anti-Black thought and action. The Wonkhe@Home: Black Lives Matter event (July 2020) sought to share pragmatic advice for ‘taking action to tackle racism across HE’, aware of the responsibility for the Higher Education sector to acknowledge its own role in consecrating racist forms of knowledge. This ‘statement’ translates session outcomes for Popular Music Academics (PMA), provoking the ethical imperative to reflect upon individual situational praxis towards White Allyship action. Through consideration of PMA’s typical fields of agency, I make suggestions towards development of anti-racist learning cultures within Popular Music Higher Education.

Hyperreality of #BlackLivesMatter Movement on Social Media

This study aims to reveal how hyperreality is reflected in using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on social media. The death of an African-American, George Floyd, that involved white police, has sparked outrage and demonstrations in many U.S. states. Issues pertaining to racism sparked in relation to the event, and many people protested demanding justice. The demand for justice then went into a wave of massive global protests both in offline and online realities—the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was widely used on social media when protests were held. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag even became a trending topic on several social media platforms, as if everyone was concerned about the issue and aiming for the same purpose. However, we might find several posts that neither reflected nor were related to the case. Some social media users put the hashtag even though their content substance was not related. This phenomenon then led to a condition of hyperreality in questioning reality from a simulation of reality. The method used in this study is content analysis which measures the sentiment of comments on Twitter and Instagram. The study found that social networking sites mobilised online movements even though they were not directly related to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. On the other hand, hashtag activism reduced the true meaning of the social movement. Therefore, the hyperreality in #BlackLivesMatter could not be seen any longer as a form of massive protests demanding justice and ending violence, but merely to gain more digital presence on social media. Keywords: Black lives matter, movement, social media, hyperreality, hashtag activism.

The small-world network of global protests

Protest diffusion is a cascade process that can spread over different regions of the planet. The way and the extension that this phenomenon can occur is still not properly understood. Here, we empirically investigate this question using protest data from GDELT and ICEWS, two of the most extensive and longest-running data sets freely available. We divide the globe into grid cells and construct a temporal network for each data set where nodes represent cells and links are established between nodes if their protest events co-occur. We show that the temporal networks are small-world, indicating that the cells are directly linked or separated by a few steps on average. Furthermore, the average path lengths are decreasing through the years, which suggests that the world is becoming “smaller”. The persistent temporal hubs present in both data sets indicate that protests can spread faster through the hubs. This topological feature is consistent with the hypothesis that protests can quickly diffuse from one region to any other part of the globe.

Laughing with, Laughing at

The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world’s premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.

Reflections on 2020

AbstractIn his 1953 novel of ideas, The Outsider, Richard Wright ominously predicted that industrial capitalist society would inexorably result in “the total and absolute in modern life.” Wright did not mean that Soviet communism would prevail, capturing the hearts and minds of Americans. His point was that the West's capitalist democracy was just as capable of slouching toward a dystopian, totalitarian future as the Soviet Union. How might Wright’s prescient thoughts on the death of liberal democracy inform our attempts to save ourselves from the “totalitarian danger” looming in the United States? As multiracial American democracy, voting rights, and the rule of law are under assault from the U.S. far right, it is abundantly clear that anti‐Black racism animates the enemies of democracy and those who would establish and support autocratic rule. These reflections seek to historicize the assault on democracy in the US and the epochal events of 2020, including: the global protests following the murder of George Floyd by police; the death of hundreds of thousands in the US during the global Coronavirus pandemic; and concerted efforts by Trump and the far‐right to destroy multiracial democracy before and after the 2020 election, culminating in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Life Paths to Leading Systems-Level Change: Higher Education's Pitfalls and Potential

Global protests calling for accelerated climate change action, social justice, and racial equity have been shifting long-standing conversations and policies from local to national scales. Yet many activists can become psychologically drained by the frustration and loss of hope in fighting against structural oppression. This study was comprised of semi-structured qualitative interviews spanning across the United States with 25 leaders and practitioners in permaculture design, a solutions-based ecological design framework to enact positive, systems-level environmental and social change. The objective was to better understand their life paths toward such work. The research showed that higher education is not adequately preparing individuals for engaging in systems-level change, and it is also not accessible to many looking to pursue this work. Given these institutional inadequacies, transdisciplinary programs and practical applications of systems-level frameworks remain underdeveloped and underutilized. There is a need for inclusive, hands-on, solutions-based frameworks that can confront the growing and complex contemporary concerns and can be integrated throughout academic programs and institutional structures. Higher education must serve a more central role in promoting transformative change to help current and future generations move away from degenerative patterns of environmental and social destruction and toward a more socially just and environmentally regenerated planet.