Social Protest Movements Research Articles

HAZEL BARNES AND OCTAVIO PAZ:TWO EXISTENTIALIST AND PAN-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHIES OF EDUCATION

As loyal critics of the university whose worldviews furthered key existentialist commitments, Octavio Paz and Hazel Barnes advanced philosophies of education inspired by the struggles of the 1968 student social protest movements. Their appeals to what a complete university education is and ought be demonstrate remarkable compatibility given their existentialist affinities and so are relevant to a normative critique of the mission of today's colleges and universities. Both took seriously the idea that the university's didactic mission should include the ideal of cultivating a socially and politically desirable, and morally defensible, account of the individual self in action. These thinkers also contended that the university should be seen as a place where selves in action rehearse engaged moral reflection towards self-fulfillment and social justice across generations. Seen against the violence that marred such episodes as the police riots during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 and the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City weeks later, my argument demonstrates how and why the radical normative underpinning of Barnes' and Paz's philosophies of education offer important guidelines for appraising the purposive nature of today's university. One key outcome of my paper is that it points the way towards what I will call a pan-American existentialist philosophy of education that is responsive to the generational needs, ideals, and challenges of students today across the universities, communities, and nations of the western hemisphere, especially between the United States and Mexico.

The Russian Orthodox Church and Social Movement Protests: Is Unity Possible?

The Russian Orthodox Church and Social Movement Protests: Is Unity Possible?

Urban Social Movements and the Struggle for Affordable Housing in the Globalizing City of Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Facing a severe housing crisis since 2008 and under pressure from an unprecedented social protest movement (particularly in 2011), the city of Tel Aviv has become an institutional laboratory for innovative experiments in housing regulation. Against this background, the author analyzes whether these recent shifts point towards a post-neoliberal transformation and a partial decommodification of housing in the interest of both middle-class and lower-class households. The empirical evidence used in this research stems mainly from a media analysis and thirty-three semistructured interviews conducted with political activists, housing experts, local politicians, and urban planners. This study shows that local political elites did indeed develop a number of affordable housing projects, while being less reluctant than their national counterparts to intervene in market pricing. However, these pioneering regulatory experiments hardly point towards a post-neoliberal direction. Despite small-scale market interventions, local decision makers define ‘affordable housing’ not in terms of social justice but, rather, by emphasizing the negative impact of rising housing prices on the global competitiveness of Tel Aviv. Accordingly, all innovative experiments in housing regulation focus exclusively on the needs and possibilities of middle-class households whose skilled labor power is seen as an essential economic asset for Tel Aviv's global city strategy. In addition to this, affordable housing projects are framed as tools to redevelop and gentrify the city's poorer southern and southeastern neighborhoods. As such, the author concludes that this clear class bias reflects a continuity of urban neoliberalism. Due to pressure from mass protests, the political elites may have changed their discourse but not their basic political agendas. These outcomes are explained by the lingering cohesion of local power relations and the strategic selectivity of the local state, since municipal public finances in Tel Aviv are heavily dependent on ground rent appropriation and, thus, entrepreneurial urban development strategies.

Coming Out of the Campus Closet: The Emerging Visibility of Queer Students at the University of Florida, 1970–1982

This historical work chronicles the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) student visibility at the University of Florida from 1970 to 1982. It focuses on the establishment of an LGBTQ student group and student reactions to queer visibility. This work relies heavily on the student newspaper for the student perspective, and shows how the emergence of queer students was part of the expansion of student affairs offices and how queer student movements grew from other social protest movements. Higher education history has almost entirely omitted queer experiences, and queer history has not looked deeply into higher education.

Civil Society, Ngos, and Egypt’s 2011 Popular Uprising

Western policymakers, scholars, and foundations share a broad consensus that a dynamic civil society, often reduced to the presence of NGOs, is the essential ingredient of democracy. Although the concept of civil society is imprecisely and ubiquitously deployed, rendering it of dubious analytical utility, it has been widely applied to the Arab region. Despite the proliferation of Arab NGOs and other forms of association, authoritarian Arab regimes were fairly effective in blocking the emergence of truly independent associations of any sort. In fact, “civil society organizations” played only a small role in mobilizing the demonstrations and occupations of public space that were the emblematic expressions of the 2011 Arab uprisings. The Egyptian and other Arab popular uprisings were not the result of proliferating NGOs or “building civil society.” Rather, they were the consequence of converging vectors of diverse social protest movements over the previous decades involving urban intelligentsias, disaffected educated youth, blue- and white-collar workers and professionals, and marginalized religious communities and regions.

Humor and Social Movements

AbstractAt first glance, humor and politics may appear oppositional. Politics is often understood as serious, important, and grave, while humor is perceived as lighthearted and frivolous. Beneath the surface, however, it is evident that humor and politics are actually inextricably linked and have been throughout political history. This paper interrogates the tensions between humor and seriousness, importance and frivolity, and legitimate and dismissible to examine the manifestations of humor in social movement protest. I discuss how humor is used as a communicative and emotional strategy for social movement activists and organizations and focus on two constellations of movement humor: humor directed outside the group in the forms of tactics and frames, which I term external humor, and the role of humor in leadership, collective identity, and emotional labor, termed internal humor. To illustrate the role of humor in protest, I integrate examples from scholarly research, media depictions, and participant observation data to provide examples of how humor is manifest as an external tactic, social movement frame, and its potential role in strengthening ties to leadership and collective identity. The essay concludes by highlighting some potential paths for future study about the relationship between humor, ideology, identity, and power.

The Struggle to Reclaim the City

The potential for citizens to reclaim and reappropriate the physical spaces of their city has garnered a great deal of attention over the past year or so. The Occupy movement, “Arab Spring,” and various social protest movements around the world have all reinvigorated debates over the political importance of public space. These movements posit an alternate historical trajectory to the one depicted by urban theorists and sociologists over the past half-century, who lament the steady “decline” of public space. One of the most vocal critics of the detrimental effects of contemporary urban planning for the sanctity of public space and urban life is the New York–based architect, academic, and architectural critic Michael Sorkin. Sorkin is currently Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. He is the author of several books and hundreds of articles on buildings, cities, and urban planning and design. In this interview, Sorkin weighs into these debates over the political and social importance of public space in cities and the challenges to disempowerment and disenfranchisement in urban environments. He discusses his early influences, the ongoing importance of Jane Jacobs to urban planning, sustainable living and “the possibility of New York becoming completely self-sufficient within its political boundaries”; as well as his views on the Occupy movement and post-9/11 surveillance and paranoia.

Police-technology Assemblages and Social Movement Protest: Intervention and Political Decomposition

Police-technology Assemblages and Social Movement Protest: Intervention and Political Decomposition

The Adversarial Politics of Fiscal Federalism: Tax Policy and the Conservative Ascendancy in Canada, 1988–2008

When and how do tax regimes become sites of social protest and support broader movements of social policy reform? This question has drawn increasing interest from political sociologists and political scientists who have looked at the ways in which tax regimes create political cleavages that create the foundations for major shifts in state policy making or become the focal points of collective identity formation, leading to “tax protests.” In this paper we seek to contribute to this line of inquiry through an examination of the politics of Canadian tax policy from 1988 through 2008. What makes this case so compelling is that during these years the debates over tax policy raged over, first, the implementation and, later, the reduction of a federal value-added tax (VAT). However, rather than fueling a broad-based tax protest, debates over the VAT heightened interprovincial political cleavages that allowed the Conservatives to tie the question of the VAT to a broader economic program of typically “neoliberal” reforms: improving private-sector competitiveness and shrinking the size of the state. Drawing on a statistical analysis of the Canadian Election Study and an historical analysis of the conflict over taxation, we show how the federal structure of the Canadian state, and its policies of revenue equalization across the provinces, created an interprovincial adversarial politics that made sales tax reduction a key issue for Canadian voters. Our findings show how recognizing the historically contingent and institutionally specific context of struggles over tax policy helps to explain cross-national variation in the politics of taxation.

Rancière, Politics, and the Occupy Movement

This paper focuses on the work of Jacques Rancière, his view of politics, and its relevance for understanding key aspects of social protest movements such as the Occupy movement. The paper outlines some of Rancière's key concepts, such as the distinction between politics and the police, subjectivity, ‘in-between spaces’, and ‘insubstantial communities’, and attempts to locate his concept of politics within a wider spectrum of political forms in order to bring out its distinctive nature. Links are then made to the ideas and practices of the Occupy movement as an expression of politics that Rancière has recently endorsed. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the critical questions concerning the effectiveness of this style of politics (questions of political organisation and engagement with the state) and the wider consequences for Rancière's concept of radical politics.

Time, place, technology: Twitter as an information source in the Wisconsin labor protests

Recently, Twitter has become a prominent part of social protest movement communication. This study examines Twitter as a new kind of citizen journalism platform emerging at the aggregate in the context of such “crisis” situations by undertaking a case study of the use of Twitter in the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. A corpus of more than 775,000 tweets tagged with #wiunion during the first 3weeks of the protests provides the source of the analyses. Findings suggest that significant differences exist between users who tweet via mobile devices, and thus may be present at protests, and those who tweet from computers. Mobile users post fewer URLs overall; however, when they do, they are more likely to link to traditional news sources and to provide additional hashtags for context. Over time, all link-posting declines, as users become better able to convey first-hand information. Notably, results for most analyses significantly change when restricted to original tweets only, rather than including retweets.

The Rules of Engagement: Comparing Two Social Protest Movements on YouTube

Social media Web sites such as YouTube offer activists unique opportunities to reach out to new audiences through a variety of diverse appeals. Yet the rules of engagement on social media should depend on the structures, goals, and characteristics of the movements engaging in this outreach. To explore how differences in social movements translate into online activism, we employ a paired case study approach, comparing YouTube artifacts for two political mobilizations: the Occupy Movement and California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative concerning same sex marriage. Across movements, we examine the popularity of videos and their characteristics, and whether the type of video consistently predicts video engagement. We find that "social media activism" is not a unitary phenomenon; the two mobilizations produced unique YouTube ecologies. Occupy Wall Street videos tended on average to produce less engagement and focused on filmed live events and amateur content. Meanwhile, Proposition 8 videos usually produced more engagement and bridged more diverse formats: from professionalized and scripted content to live event footage and unscripted monologues to the camera. Therefore, our study suggests that social activism in online spaces such as YouTube is not easily defined, but is adapted to suit movement needs-which makes social media a popular and flexible venue for activism but also highlights the challenges for scholars studying such venues.

Contemporary Left-Right Contestation

Any reflection on contemporary left-right contestation cannot but avoid recognition that the relative clarity, if not certainty, of such contestation during capitalism's Golden Age is decidedly a feature of the past. The array of actors engaged in political contestation has broadened to include nonpartisan forces on the left and right, reflecting a plethora of more narrowly defined interests; just as the terrain of contestation itself has moved beyond the confines of national parliaments and subnational legislatures up to the level of international organizations and out on to the street in the form of social movement protest. Even at the partisan level, there are more extensive divisions within both the left and the right, in particular with the emergence of the greens and the radical right. Yet, at the same time, the qualitative differences that historically distinguished the parties of the center-left and center-right appear far less clear and distinct, with a narrowing of policy differences and the increasing similarity of the class backgrounds of their elected representatives.

The Arab Protest Movements : An Insight into the Present , the Challenges and the Future

This research seeks to spotlight the phenomenon of the social protest movement that has swept a number of the Arab States. The researcher relied on the historical points of departure and sociology and political terminology in monitoring these movements so as to describe them and determine their identity, history, components, strength and ability to affect change. This came within a gradual approach starting with the onset of the Arab uprisings and ending with the time of preparing this discourse. The researcher point of departure was that no matter how the political system tries to safeguard itself through despotism, violence and security forces, it will reach a point where it cannot meet the internal challenges, since these arise from one side of the equation of the composition of the state… which means the people. And in order to put this assumption to the test, the researcher posed a set of principles, and adopted the historical approach, the approach of the systems, as well the approach of the decision – maker and political participation. The research concluded that the these protest movements face immense challenges… like the fear of falling into chaos, confusion or the trap of time slackness that cause them to lose momentum. Those in charge of these movements must be vigilant so as not to go outside the desired objectives.

Postcolonial Times: Lock the Gate or Pull Down the Fences? A special Monograph Edition

The development of a rural coal seam gas industry in regional Australia, together with its key technology, fracking, has been met by a very active, lively and vocal social protest movement. This 2013 Tricontinental Lecture in Postcolonial Studies reflects on this protest movement from two perspectives. First, it examines what a postcolonial studies perspective may bring to further understanding the relationships and dynamics between the industry and the protest movement. Secondly, it considers what postcolonial scholars themselves may be able to bring to critiques of social issues such as this environmental contention. The example described in this lecture also reminds us that postcolonial studies concerns more than the three continents of the Tricontinent, Latin America, Africa and Asia, and that it is centrally concerned with access to environmental resources. Building on the history of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and the growth of postcolonial political philosophy and studies that focus on power, equity and access in postcolonial societies, this essay considers the power differentials between industry and government on the one hand, and the protest movement on the other. By examining the role of language and its control, a key social process in the wielding of power, it is shown that the coal seam gas development debate is couched in terms of industrial or governmental language, and not in the language of the community. This has three important consequences. First, opponents are forced to express concerns about technical matters or scientific matters, thus legitimising the proposed activity. Secondly, opponents are not authorised, within the formal sphere, to express their own feelings through their language of social anxiety, of love of the country, of being in the community, of history. Thirdly, both sides find themselves in a typical cross-cultural dilemma: either speak an inadequate form of language that the other party understands but that does not actually express what you mean, or speak your own language and risk the other party not understanding what you mean. Copyright © Bill Boyd 2013. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Coolabah, No.12, 2013, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 2 From a postcolonial studies perspective, this example reminds students of two key processes. First, students need to master the intellectual skills of the humanities in order to provide critical analysis of social situations. Secondly, students need to know that, as western scholars, they are as much part of any postcolonial problem as those in power, and therefore need to develop good reflective skills and to learn to think ‘otherwise’. This invited monograph is the text of the lecture, supplemented with further comments and illustrations, delivered to second year Humanities students at the University of Barcelona, Catalonia, on Monday 8th April 2013

The Tribunal: responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid

When John Brown led twenty-one men in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, he envisioned a biblical uprising of millions of armed bondsmen, thus ridding the nation of the scourge of slavery. The insurrection did not happen, and Brown and the other surviving raiders were quickly captured and executed. This landmark anthology, which collects contemporary speeches, letters, newspaper articles, journals, poems, and songs, demonstrates that Brown's actions nonetheless altered the course of American history. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd have assembled an impressive and wide-ranging collection of responses to Brown's raid: Brown's own words, northern and southern reactions, international commentary, and reflections from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Represented here are all the figures one would expect to see (Lincoln, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass), many surprises (John Wilkes Booth, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Garibaldi), as well as free and enslaved blacks and white citizens. The result is a book that views Brown from multiple vantage points. The Introduction describes the panic that Harpers Ferry created in the South, splitting the Democratic Party along sectional lines and altering the outcome of the 1860 presidential election. Without Brown, it speculates, the Civil War and emancipation would have been delayed by another four years--probably more--which in turn might have disrupted emancipation movements in Brazil, Cuba, and even Russia. The Tribunal is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War era and the history of social protest movements.

Israel’s J14 Social Protest Movement and Its Imaginings of ‘Home’: On Music, Politics and Social Justice

The J14 social protest movement in Israel (2011) began as a protest against the high cost of living, and most prominently, the inflated cost of housing. However, it quickly became the site of an emerging public discourse regarding the relationship between power and one’s home, whether material dwelling or the universe of meanings associated with home, homeland, citizenship, nationality and ethnicity. This article explores the ways in which expressive culture—musical, visual and discursive—provided the engine for envisioning and contesting new imaginaries of home and contextualizing political action within the protest. A focus on Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Palestinian city, highlights the ways in which expressive culture negotiated inherent tensions surrounding the meanings of ‘home’ that were brought into the open in Israel’s marginalized peripheries.

Дивный, но далеко не новый мир политкорректности

The article discusses the book “Divnyi, Novyi Mir Politkorrektnosti” (2012) by Leonid Ionin. The definition of political correctness (PC) as an ideology and the theoretical justification given by the author are analyzed. The mechanism of PC on the example of Jirondin clubs and their role in the French revolution are described. Recent examples and criticism of PC in theUSAare described. The new understanding of the phenomenon of PC in the context of social protest movements is presented.

140 Characters or Less: How Is the Twitter Mediascape Influencing the Egyptian Revolution?

The globalization of media allows for the images and stories of marginalized and excluded groups to be seen and heard by more people than ever before, creating ‘mediascapes’ in which such populations compete for visibility on an imagined global stage. We liken 140-character Twitter messages, sent and received regarding North African social protests, as one such mediascape providing a slice of reality into the political ideology of Egyptian youth. Informed by anthropological theory and utilizing the powerful data collection techniques available to computer systems technicians, this research explores the possibilities of analyzing Twitter data related to Egypt’s 2011 political protests. In consideration of the role of Twitter in 2009 Iranian elections, this was chosen as the media platform to analyze Egyptian events. Five properties make it an ideal form to express political protest. Twitter is: 1) quick, providing real-time information in 140 characters or less, 2) free, 3) personal, 4) highly mobile and resistant to government control and 5) it can be anonymous. In seeking to answer our research questions on the role Twitter continues to play in Egyptian protests, we analyzed Twitter feeds to test for the existence of ‘authorities’ and ‘hubs’. Authorities can be considered the leaders of social protest movements (those persons creating original content in Twitter and playing an active role in setting up meeting days, times and places), while hubs serve as data dissemination points with large Twitter followings.

Homogenizing "Old" and "New" Social Movements: A Comparison of Partipants in May Day and Climate Change Demonstrations

We assess whether the distinction between old and new social movements still holds by examining the social class and value orientations of participants in old and new social movement protests. We argue that new cleavages have emerged from globalization, affecting not only electoral politics, but also contentious politics, and thereby having a homogenization effect on the structural basis of movements of the left. Moreover, we hypothesize that traditional cleavages, such as class mediate the homogenization effect of new cleavages. We look at participants in May Day and climate change demonstrations in Belgium and Sweden, two countries that differ in terms of strength of class cleavage. Results show that there is evidence of homogenization between old and new social movements and that this effect is more important when the class cleavage is stronger.