Progressive Social Movements Research Articles

Progressive social movements

At the time of writing this article, one of the bastions of liberal democracy is in great turmoil. On 6 January 2021, protesters loyal to President Trump invaded the capitol to stop the certification of election results. It was a move characterised as domestic terrorism and condemned as anti-democratic by politicians from across the aisle. For many commentators, this was an inescapable result of Trumpism left unchecked, of the unfettered circulation of lies and the stoking of resentment against the democratic establishment. Articles question whether America can bridge the rift between democrat and republican forces or whether differences have become irreconcilable. But such polarisation is not the preserve of the US. It is also rampant in other liberal representative democracies, including the UK where Brexit has laid bare the split between remainers and leavers, liberals and conservatives.

Progressive Law, Activism, and Lawyering in an Age of Preemption

Preemption is one of the most important legal doctrines for today’s progressives to understand because of its power to constrain progressive policymaking and social movement lawyering at the state and local level. By examining the detailed history of a decades-long campaign by the labor and environmental movements to improve working conditions in an industry at the heart of the global supply chain, Scott L. Cummings’s Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port (2018) provides a case study about the doctrine and impacts of preemption. The study also inspires lawyers and activists alike to reexamine core questions of factual relevance, representation and voice, and precedent.

Vulnerability theory and higher education

ABSTRACT Vulnerability theory stresses the role of an active state that is responsive to our common human needs: health, safety, sustenance, shelter, education, and fulfilling work. This article studies institutions of higher education in the US and UK through the lens of vulnerability theory, examining the role of the state to serve the public interest through its colleges and universities. The history of higher education in the US and UK, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, reveals advances in the development of institutions with a public mission committed to broad student access, strong faculty employment rights, and the public domain of research and knowledge. Since the 1980s, however, the imposition of state neoliberal policy has undermined the public mission of higher education through cuts in public funding, rising tuition and student debt, contingent faculty employment, and commercialization of academic research. Such changes have weakened the institutional structure of higher education, leaving universities ill-equipped to resist the most recent political and ideological attacks on intellectuals and progressive social movements that are nurtured in higher education institutions. At the same time, organising by faculty and student unions and professional organisations presents the potential for collective action as a form of resilience, resistance, and social change

Peer Production and Collective Action

Over the last decade, a number of progressive social movements around the world have embraced peer production principles such as collaboration, co-production, and self-organization. This chapter investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and “remediates” social change activism today. First, it traces the historical trajectory of peer production as it has come to permeate the progressive social movements of the last three decades, linking distinct approaches to organizing to technological innovation. Second, it reflects on the so-called social affordances (and constraints) of digital infrastructure and their role in fostering specific modes of creativity and convergence apt to support protest actors. Third, it explores three types of consequences of peer production for social movements, namely cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. The chapter then examines three tensions that might emerge in the process of embedding peer production mechanisms and values in instances of collective action, namely: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self-organized vs. commercial infrastructure.

Global Interdependency and Strategic Neocorporatism: The Social Identity Dynamics of Progressive Social Movements Utilizing International Sustainable Development Regimes

Global Interdependency and Strategic Neocorporatism: The Social Identity Dynamics of Progressive Social Movements Utilizing International Sustainable Development Regimes

Queer sau despre activism în gândire

As the concept of queer becomes more pervasive in the Romanian academic and activist spaces, the question concerning its conceptual content in relation to other critical notions from feminist and gender theories, as well as from critical thought in general, turns out to be quite central to the discussion. In this article, I propose a way of understanding this concept by employing the Deleuzian critical approach to philosophy and critical thought processes and formation as a starting point for elaborating future political and resistance strategies in progressive social movements.

Scrambling Sex and Gender with Rachilde

Taking Monsieur Vénus (1884) as its focus, this article expands upon the limited critical discourse connecting the work of Rachilde (1860-1953) to queer theory. Monsieur Vénus and queer theory are mutually illuminative: Butler’s theory of performativity allows us to interpret the unstable bodies in Rachilde’s text, while Monsieur Vénus in turn elucidates, or at least exemplifies, some of the questions at the heart of queer studies. For example: can sex exceed the human body? Can a transgender person live a heteronormative life? What is the relationship between queerness and reproduction? In asking such questions, this article grounds a piece of Decadent, fin-de-siècle French literature in the context of queer, feminist and trans studies, and thereby maps the connections between Rachilde’s work and these contemporary cultural conversations. As the author of Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe (1928), Rachilde rejected progressive social movements. I therefore borrow Lisa Downing’s notion of the ‘proto-queer’ (Downing, ‘Notes on Rachilde’ 16) to guard against the complete recuperation of Rachilde into the queer canon. Regardless of its author’s positionality, however, I am seeking to frame Monsieur Vénus as part of our queer literary heritage. Monsieur Vénus is more playful and provocative than it is political, but Rachilde succeeds in ‘scrambling’ sex and gender in that the two categories become muddled, unfixed and denaturalized.

Civic University or University of the Earth? A Call for Intellectual Insurgency

This article reviews an attempt to rejuvenate the concept of the civic university in the United Kingdom through the establishment of the Civic University Commission in 2018 by the UPP Foundation. This review is based on a critical appraisal of the concept of ‘civic’ on which the idea of the civic university relies. The review suggests another formulation for higher education: not the civic university but the university of the earth, built on a convergence of the social and natural sciences and Indigenous knowledges connected to world-wide progressive social movements and political struggles. The university of the earth supports an intellectual insurgency to deal with emergencies confronting humanity and the natural world.

Tax Credits vs. Corporate Social Responsibility: The Entertainment Industry's Challenge to State Anti-Abortion Bills

Corporations are consistently finding themselves at the forefront of social conversations as corporate boycotts and corporate social responsibility methods are becoming more ubiquitous in society. There has never been a better example of this than the entertainment industry’s response to Georgia’s LIFE Act, known colloquially as The Heartbeat Bill, which aimed to limit a woman’s access to an abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected. The Government of the State of Georgia offers the United States’ most expansive, sweeping, and beneficial tax credits to entertainment corporations and production companies that choose to film projects in-state. After public outcry in response to the introduction of that legislation, the entertainment corporations that benefit from Georgia’s tax incentives were forced to reckon with a moral and business dilemma: whether to remain in Georgia and continue to collect the financial benefits of filming in the state or to leave the state altogether out of support and solidarity with the women that the Government was seeking to control. This Article proposes to answer that dilemma through different legal perspectives including the dissection of Georgia’s tax incentives, an historical outlining of various boycotts of similar magnitude, and a feminist legal theory perspective. While boycotts can be an effective tool for change, in this case, entertainment corporations should continue to do business with the state and use the benefit of the Georgia tax incentives and remaining in Georgia to benefit local woman. To help the women of Georgia, these corporations should create or donate to pro-women organizations that help women in need of healthcare, child care, and employment, assist with voter registration, and combat widespread voter suppression. By remaining in Georgia, these corporations can thus fulfill their obligations to their shareholders while also participating in a positive and progressive social movement. Sometimes the most effective way to be an ally to women is to fight on the ground and in the trenches, so to speak, alongside them. In leaving the state, entertainment corporations are doing the exact opposite of what their intended actions are and, ultimately, are leaving the women of Georgia vulnerable.

Solidarity Stalled: When Chinese Activists Meet Social Movements in Democracies

This study analyzes a largely unexamined phenomenon in the studies of transnational activism: immigrant activists’ engagement in progressive social movements in their residence countries. Through participatory observation and interviews with the Chinese activist communities, this study explores how diaspora activists assess social movements in established liberal democracies in light of their experiences with organizing in a more repressive setting back home. Despite active involvement in social movements in their residence societies, these Chinese diaspora activists find the dominant models of activism in democracies to be overly institutionalized, lacking a sense of political urgency to push for real social change. The deeper and more intersectional understandings of social movements in democracies trigger positive reflections that help create new political subjectivities, but at the same time, they produce skepticism and disenchantment, lowering activists’ expectations about the power of international solidarity. By delving into activists’ transnational social movement experiences, this study critically interrogates the theoretical framework of diaspora politics and social movement learning and brings attention to the unintended consequences of transnational political engagement.

Beyond Europe: Alternative visions of Europe amongst young activists in self-managed spaces in Italy

ABSTRACT This article explores the attitude towards Europe of young activists in self-managed spaces in Italy, and the extent to which the crises the EU endured in the last decade shape their visions. Unlike pre-financial crisis social movements, in the second decade of the 2000s progressive social movements adopted radical Eurocritical attitudes and shifted towards Eurosceptic positions. The article indicates that young activists in Italian self-managed spaces mainly criticise the economic element of the European integration process and the functioning of the EU institutions. They still refer to the European sphere as the principal field of political intervention, but propose an alternative organisational model oriented by the principles of democratic confederalism and libertarian municipalism in which local, autonomous communities are horizontally connected. This article contributes to the study of Europeanisation and social movements literature by shedding light on a political alternative to the EU grounded on prefigurative practices and a self-managed society.

A fragile shield for protecting civil rights: The European Union in the eyes of Italian feminists

ABSTRACT The article explores how feminist and LGBTQI organisations frame the European Union (EU), the claims they address to the EU institutions, and the actions they put in place at the continental level. Challenging previous beliefs of a linear increase in the Europeanisation of progressive social movements, this study reveals a more complex picture. Heavily affected by the economic and political crises, Italian women and LGBTQI activists share the radical criticism of EU austerity policies put forward by labour and youth movements. Nonetheless, they reject any option for breaking down the EU, as they conceive of it as a source of multilevel opportunities and a field for struggles from below, in which mechanisms of cross-national horizontal diffusion have facilitated the return of mass protest. While chances to realise the ‘other Europe’ project are perceived as low, activists hope that the EU is a potential ally against domestic conservatism.

Neoliberalization, De-democratization, and Populist Responses in Western Europe, the US, and Latin America

This article argues that multipronged de-democratization processes over the course of neoliberal projects fostered unstable democratic equilibria in Western and Latin American democracies, opening space for populist leaders and parties to emerge. To comprehend the variation in the nature of populists that gained support, the form of neoliberalization process in each region and the consequent impacts on traditional party systems is accounted for. Moreover, the impact of region-specific factors on populist forms such as economic crises, immigration levels, and the existence of progressive social movements are accounted for. The conflux of neoliberal de-democratization, austerity, and immigration fostered a conservative nativist-populism in Western cases. In Latin America, neoliberal de-democratization and austerity, in the presence of powerful popular movements, witnessed the emergence of a more progressive populism.

“Just the Status Quo?”

Abstract*As much as recent scholarship, popular outlets, and even a documentary film have asserted that we find ourselves in another “Gilded Age” since the 1980s, such a conceit has its limits. Indeed, we should proceed with caution when it comes to embracing analogies that posit a “new” or “second” Gilded Age. We might instead profitably think about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being a period of high capitalism and our current moment as reflecting a particular, if not peculiar, phase of capitalism. And, as much as our understanding of gender and sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might actually be hindered by separating “Gilded Age” and “Progressive Era,” considering gendered dynamics of our current moment—a moment that has been termed late-stage capitalism—deepens our analysis of the low-wage economy. When it comes to sexuality, we should be careful in drawing parallels between the Gilded Age and the present given that contemporary understandings of sexuality began to coalesce during the late nineteenth century. Still, debates about sex and sexuality certainly shaped the Gilded Age and they continue to inform our current moment in dynamic and even unprecedented ways. We might not find ourselves in another Gilded Age, but we should arguably build upon current interest in histories of capitalism as a means think about the significance of progressive social movements within capitalist societies.

Pierre Bourdieu on social transformation, with particular reference to political and symbolic revolutions

This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectively synchronized across fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements.

Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory

Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory

Gharbzadegi in Iran: A Reactionary Alternative to ‘Development’?

Post-development theory usually engages with examples from Latin America and India and investigates alternative concepts and practices by progressive social movements. This article addresses a post-development concept which originates in Iran, Gharbzadegi or occidentosis, which after the Islamic revolution in 1979 was promoted by the anti-Western Iranian government. It argues that the instrumentalization by right-wing governments should not distract from the emancipatory potential of post-development concepts.

Populism, globalisation and social media

Since the 2010s, we witness the rise of populism and nationalism as part of a reaction against the global policies of the last 30 years in Western liberal democracies and beyond. This article seeks to unpack the rise of populism and nationalism and its relationship to social media. We review the relevant literature relating to the globalization paradigm and assess how it has influenced communication studies. The rise of the globalization theory coincides with key advancements in the post-Cold War world, such as the growth of international trade, the global movement of people, the increase in the number of international laws and forums, economic liberalism, as well as the rise of the internet and global digital communication networks. But while the global era denotes a cosmopolitan vision, economic insecurity, growing inequality in wealth distribution, as well as cultural change and shifts in traditional values and norms have brought about a broader concern that globalization is associated with a shift of power to transnational elites, whose impact upon common people’s life and experiences is not fully acknowledged. Contemporary populism has been associated with nationalism, but also with the active use of social media platforms as alternative communication sites to mainstream media which is seen as having been captured by elite consensus politics. This complicates the relationship between truth and free expression in an age of social media, meaning that we need to account for the role of such platforms in the rise of populism and ‘post-truth’ politics, as well as its scope to advance the goals and strategies of progressive social movements.

Big dreams and small steps: comparative perspectives on the social movement struggle for democracy in Serbia and North Macedonia

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a comparative analysis of social movements’ characteristics and capacities to struggle against illiberal tendencies and incite political change in Serbia and North Macedonia. First, we discuss the illiberal elements of political regimes in the countries in question, Serbia and North Macedonia. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview of progressive social movements in the two countries, formed and organized as a response to different authoritarian and non-democratic tendencies. Finally, we point to some differences in their organizing, coalition-forging and issue-defining principles, which, we believe, may help to explain the relative success of social movements in North Macedonia in producing relevant political outcomes, compared to the weak political impact of social movements in Serbia. Empirical data were collected during the summer of 2018 through in-depth interviews with members of social movements in North Macedonia and Serbia.

In Defense of Resistance

Resistance to unjust power and authority has long been the angry energy of everyday struggle, the defiant democratization of progressive social movements, and the motor force of progressive social change. As critical criminologists, then, our role is to defend the practice of resistance and to explore its radical potential. In doing so, we can usefully investigate emergent moments of resistance that transcend narrow notions of individual intentionality, and we can trace the intricate interplay between immediate acts of resistance and larger dynamics of social transformation. We can focus especially on forms of resistance that both reveal the operations of power and reverse those operations in the interest of social justice. Most importantly, we can move beyond the sort of faux-radical pessimism that denies the potential of contemporary resistance, and embrace instead a multitude of resistant possibilities.