Movement's Critique Research Articles

The Ten Hours Movement and the Working-Class Family in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

AbstractThe Ten Hours Movement of the 1830s and 1840s in Britain was the first large-scale working-class struggle to challenge the impact of industrial capitalism upon working-class family life. Yet its discourse on family has been relatively neglected by historians of the movement. This article examines the nature of the movement's critique, the vision of family life that it tried to realize, and the challenge that this posed to the emerging bourgeois order and, on this basis, to reconsider its contribution to the gender ordering of working-class family life.

Beyond Feminism? Jineolojî and the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement

AbstractJineolojî, the women's science proposed and developed by the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement, has become central to its transnational organizing both in the Middle East and in Europe and the Americas. Activists in the Kurdish women's movement critique positivist and androcentric forms of knowledge production as well as liberal feminism. They instead propose Jineolojî, which aims to rediscover women's histories and restore women's central place in society. Based on a series of interviews with Kurdish women involved in developing Jineolojî, this article first situates Jineolojî within wider transnational and decolonial feminist approaches and then draws out the main ideas constituting Jineolojî. We focus on the ways Jineolojî speaks to ongoing discussions within transnational feminist knowledge production. Our article critically assesses the claim of Kurdish women activists who present Jineolojî as a new science and paradigm that goes beyond feminism while developing our argument that Jineolojî represents an important continuation of critical interventions made by marginalized women activists and academics transnationally. Moreover, our article illustrates that Jineolojî provides a helpful ideological underpinning for and epistemology of Kurdish women's political struggle for gender-based equality and justice.

Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain by Luis I. Prádanos

Reviewed by: Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain by Luis I. Prádanos Jennifer Brady Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain. Liverpool UP, 2018 by Luis I. Prádanos In response to the global postgrowth crisis caused by the unsustainable and undesirable effects of capitalism, the lens of ecological cultural studies may be used to analyze works of film, literature, and popular culture. In his new book Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain, Luis I. Prádanos's masterful approach situates postgrowth issues in the context of a mosaic of varied contemporary Spanish cultural products. The book explores the consequences of economic growth on our environment and ways of living and calls for a shift of paradigm, one that seeks to establish a more sustainable way of being in the world. Prádanos offers commentary on how a collective approach based on the decolonialization of capitalism could serve as a point of departure in finding solutions to destructive economic policies and unsustainable growth patterns. Prádanos presents contemporary Spain as the perfect petri dish in which to study the global postgrowth crisis. From the ironic "milagro económico" of the 1960s to the aftermath of the indignados movement, Spain has experienced negative effects of overconsumption and lack of fair distribution of wealth and resources, which, consequently, has led to what the author correctly tags as "the Spanish Neoliberal crisis" in the first chapter. Here, a succinct look at the effects of the economic crisis of 2008 in Spain and the aftermath of the 15M movement critique of free markets and deregulation is presented. Chapter 2, titled "Urban Ecocriticism and Spanish Cultural Studies," is a must-read for those who study contemporary Spain, new ecologies, and urban cultural studies. This section, in fact, is so packed with intriguing information that it could have been an entire book in itself. Here, Prádanos seems to make an implicit call to readers to continue studying these cultural productions in order to continue spreading the message that there are better ways of being in our world. His message is incredibly inspiring. Perhaps the gem of Prádanos's book, "the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and the urban experience" is skillfully analyzed in cultural products from twenty-first-century Spain in chapter 2 (Bennett and Teague, "Urban Ecocriticism: An Introduction" in The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, 1999, p. 10, qtd. by Prádanos 91). Prádanos first schools the reader on urban theories—he precisely and clearly explains key ideas from Marx, Fraser, Harvey, Girardet, and more—and then explains several recent cultural productions in Spain that offer counternarratives to the notion that economic growth is advantageous. Some of the cultural products that the author discusses in this chapter are as follows. Films, Sobre ruedas: el sueño del automóvil (dir. Óscar Clemente, 2011), Mercado de futuros (dir. Mercedes Álvarez, 2011), and Gente en sitios (dir. Juan Cavestany, 2013) challenge Spain's response to the economic crisis of 2008 and the notion that growth is favorable. Two dystopian novels based in Madrid by Rosa Montero, Lágrimas en la lluvia (2011) and El peso del corazón (2015), encourage readers to reimagine the human relationship with the environment. The short novel Distintas formas de mirar el agua (2015) by Julio Llamazares offers a critique of the construction of dams and reservoirs carried out in the mid-twentieth-century in Spain, and, thus, "fictionalizes some of the [End Page 259] specific consequences of Franco's technocratic project in Spain and its authoritarian, biopolitical management of populations" (Prádanos 131). Two books, La voz de los sabios (Elena García Quevedo, 2013) and Palabras mayores: un viaje por la memoria rural (Emilio Gancedo, 2015) vindicate rural communities of Spain. The graphic novel Memorias de la tierra (Miguel Brieva, 2012) criticizes contemporary human life from an extraterrestrial perspective. Also explored in this chapter: street art, performance art, a website, public manifestations like the 15M encampments in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, public gardens, a magazine. All of these cultural products share the common objective of challenging the...

Performing alternative agriculture: critique and recuperation in Zero Budget Natural Farming, South India

This article explores how 'Zero Budget Natural Farming', an Indian natural farming movement centered on its founder and guru Subhash Palekar, enacts alternative agrarian worlds through the dual practices of critique and recuperation. Based on fieldwork among practitioners in the South Indian state of Kerala and on participation in teaching events held by Palekar, I describe the movement's critique of the agronomic mainstream (state extension services, agricultural universities, and scientists) and their recuperative practices of restoring small-scale cultivation based on Indian agroecological principles and biologies. Their critique combines familiar political-ecological arguments against productionism, and the injustices of the global food regime, with Hindu nationalist tropes highlighting Western conspiracies and corrupt science. For their recuperative work, these natural farmers draw, on one hand, on travelling agroecological technologies (fermentation, spacing, mulching, cow based farming) and current 'probiotic', microbiological, and symbiotic understandings of soil and agriculture. On the other hand, they use Hindu nativist tropes, insisting on the exceptional properties of agrarian species native to, and belonging to India. I use the idea of ontological politics to describe the movement's performances as enacting an alternative rural world, in which humans, other-than-human animals, plants, mycorrhizae, and microbes are doing agriculture together.Keywords: agricultural anthropology; alternative agricultures; naturecultures; critique; ontological politics; small-scale cultivators; India; Kerala; Subhash Palekar

The Tragedy of (Ignoring) the Information Semicommons: A Cultural Environmental Perspective

The second enclosure movement critique is familiar theoretical territory for scholars concerned with the creeping maximalist impulse of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). Just as the first enclosure movement relating to real property created controversies concerning social contract and the advertised efficiencies of private real property, so too these concerns are echoed within the context of IPRs. This paper employs the emergent discourse of cultural environmentalism so as to diagnose and resolve IPR issues evident within the information environment. Cultural environmentalism borrows, begs, and steals analytical frameworks from environmentalism, such as those relating to the commons, public choice theory, welfare economics, and ecology. After proffering a brief overview of the second enclosure movement critique and cultural environmentalism, this paper settles on the analytical framework of the commons. Specifically, it is the commons-related tragedies such as the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of the anticommons, and the tragedy of (ignoring) the information semicommons, that provide insight into critical efficiency concerns that lie dormant within the information environment. Ultimately, the paper argues that to ignore the benefits accruing from the dynamic interaction between private and commons uses of information is a tragedy — the tragedy of (ignoring) the information semicommons.

The Disability Movement's Critique of Rehabilitation's Medical Model: A Rebuttal.

Developing a dignifying disability policy requires coming to terms with both the disability rights advocates’ opposition to the medical model and the cultural denial of age-related disability.

TENSIONS IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN'S CRITIQUE OF THEISTIC EVOLUTIONISM

Abstract“Intelligent Design” (ID) is a contemporary intellectual movement arguing that there is scientific evidence for the existence of some sort of creator. Its proponents see ID as a scientific research program and as a way to build a bridge between science and theology, while many critics see it merely as a repackaged form of religiously motivated creationism: both bad science and bad theology. In this article, I offer a close reading of the ID movement's critique of theistic evolutionism and argue that this critique is ultimately in tension with the movement's broader thought.

The Separation of (Economic) Power: A Cultural Environmental Perspective of Social Production and the Networked Public Sphere

This article applies the second enclosure movement critique to Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), It employs the emergent discourse of cultural environmentalism so as to diagnose and resolve IPR issues evident within the information environment. Cultural environmentalism borrows analytical frameworks from environmentalism, such as those relating to the commons, public choice theory, welfare economics, and ecology. The article provides a brief overview of the second enclosure movement critique and cultural environmentalism. It adopts the analytical framework of the commons. Specifically, it is the commons-related tragedies such as the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of the anticommons, and the tragedy of (ignoring) the information semicommons, that provide insight into critical efficiency concerns that lie dormant within the information environment. Ultimately, the article argued that there are certain conditions and situations where social production may trump other modes of production within the information processing and allocation efficiency realms. Drawing upon Benkler’s hardware-code-content paradigm, it was seen that it is the code layer of a given technology that provides the greatest social production opportunities. The realization of these opportunities will depend, at least to some extent, on the cyclical timing of critical hardware infrastructure within a given industry. The fundamental thesis of this paper was that where relevant infrastructure is readily accessible; where the factors of production include undeveloped ideas and unarticulated know-how; and where the allocation of human creativity and/or intellectual input are relied upon as the impetus of innovation, social production may be the most efficient mode of production when contrasted with alternate modes of production such as state-, firm-, or market-based production. An important corollary of this article that is implicit within the paper is that social production provides opportunity to diversify the modes of production available within future technological production processes and, in so doing, affords the possibility of harnessing the critical liberal function of separating (economic) power.

THe Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

ABSTRACT This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement's critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor's propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japan's most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women.

The Origins and Nature of the Holiness Movement Church: A Study in Religious Populism

This article examines the development of holiness-inspired dissent in Canada by focusing on the Holiness Movement Church, a sect led by Methodist evangelist R.C. Homer and created in opposition to official Methodism in 1895. It investigates the relationship between holiness and Methodism and finds that the Hornerite schism served to discredit the doctrine in the eyes of Methodist leaders. The holiness crisis sheds light on the broad cultural support for the experience, and demonstrates that the pressures placed upon Methodism by dissent were integral to its transformation. The schism reinforced the Holiness Movement's critique of professional elites and the middle class. As such, Hornerism and late nineteenth-century Christian perfectionism can be viewed as part of a broad populist movement intent on defending traditional social values against the forces of modernization.

The Environmental and Post-Environmental Politics of Genetically Modified Crops and Foods

The movement against genetically modified (GM) crops/foods has become progressively ‘environmentalised’ in recent years, but making environmental risk the focus of the movement's critique of GM crops is probably, for activists, a strategic mistake, for the issue is not self-evidently simply an environmental one. When anti-GM activists, pro-GM interests, and policy makers refer to ‘GM crops and foods’, they are not always referring to the same thing. Terms like GM, genetic engineering, biotechnology, transgenics, molecular biology, and basic research are used interchangeably, even though they mean quite different things. Some rethinking of the meaning of GM and of sustainability, combined with recent developments in the biological sciences, offers potential for alliances between scientists and activists in efforts to move away from GM crops and toward sustainable agriculture.

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT): Getting to the Heart of the Politics of Women's Health?

In 2002, the National Institutes of Health announced that one arm of the largest hormone study ever to be done on healthy women was being stopped for safety reasons: the risks of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) outweighed the benefi ts. This paper explores how the HRT story can be used to politicize women and their health care providers about the recurring pattern of marketing untested products to healthy women. It also provides a history of the women's health movement's critique of the lack of scientifi c evidence that HRT was safe or effective, discusses the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-pharmaceutical industry partnerships that increase the medicalization of women's health, and shows that the HRT story is not unique. Emphasizing that the Women's Health Movement is as important as ever, this paper concludes with strat- egies for ensuring that the lessons learned from the HRT story are incor- porated into practice and policy. Highlighted as well is the important role the National Women's Health Network (NWHN) played in the HRT story and its continuing crucial role in enhancing women's health.

Unhappy endings: a feminist reappraisal of the women's health movement from the vantage of pregnancy loss

This essay contrasts the rosy birth scenarios of the natural childbirth movement with reproductive disaster stories of members of pregnancy loss support groups and women from toxically assaulted communities in the US who have suffered pregnancy loss. I argue that both biomedical obstetrics and the women's health movement critique of it share a belief in the ability to control reproduction so that there will be a positive outcome. I show that this emphasis on happy endings (whether believed to be the result of medical intervention, or women's natural inborn powers to reproduce) exacerbates the experience of those whose pregnancies do not end happily. I show how the women's health movement's emphasis on the importance of women being in control of their own bodies is related to a broader “culture of meritocracy” which contributes to maternal blame (and self-blame) when pregnancies are not perfect.

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In Defense of Risk Assessment: A Reply to the Environmental Justice Movement's Critique*

ABSTRACT The environmental justice movement believes risk assessment is undemocratic. The movement believes risk assessment is a way of trading human health for profit and a means of legitimizing exposure to toxic chemicals. The movement considers risk assessment an evil industry and a tool developed by those who wish to oppress racial and ethnic minorities. These beliefs are wrong and the environmental justice movement is a Luddite enterprise. Risk assessment is a fundamentally democratic process and enables all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, income or social status, to enjoy the benefits of technology and also suffer its drawbacks within a framework of equality and democracy. “A savage servility slides by on grease.” -Robert Penn Warren For the Union Dead * This work was performed by the author in his private capacity and does not reflect the policies and views of the Environmental Protection Agency or any other agency of the Federal Government.

Slavery and freedom in nineteenth-century America

Freedom has never been a fixed category or predetermined concept. Subject to multiple interpretations, its definition has been created and recreated by historical contingencies and social conflicts. Eric Foner traces how the existence of helped to shape the understanding of freedom by Americans both white and black from the colonial era to the end of Reconstruction. He pays particular attention to the metaphorical uses of by groups seeking to expand prevailing definitions of freedom (such as the labour movement's critique of wage slavery, and criticism of the slavery of sex by early feminists) as well as to the debate over the meaning of freedom unleashed by the destruction of during the Civil War.