Struggle For Social Transformation Research Articles

Activist Co-production for the Right to Occupy, Hold Ground, and Upgrade

This article theorises a multi-year participatory action research engagement focusing on young land occupations and consolidated favelas in São Paulo’s south periphery, providing an arsenal of tools for activist-scholars. Building on Paulo Freire's legacy, we call on academia to embrace activist co-production, learn from and support informal dwellers’ everyday urbanisms, and join social movements’ struggles for social transformation. We advance three modalities of action: awareness raising through emancipatory education and capacity building; articulatção through knowledge exchange between young and consolidated informal communities; and advocacy through policy reform for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade.

Challenges of Dutertismo for Philippine Christianity

Abstract This paper concentrates on populism’s functional relationship with religion during times of crisis and how religion is instrumentalized for populist causes. Critical analysis of Philippine populism under President Rodrigo Duterte highlights often-overlooked nuances regarding populism as both disruption and reinforcement of traditional politics and its inherent institutional and religious dimensions. Though Dutertismo disrupts Manila-centric power, it reinforces traditional politics rooted in the Philippine political and cultural ethos. Moreover, because of populism’s institutional and religious dimensions, Dutertismo’s challenges to Philippine Christianity involve both its social and evangelizing missions. As institutions, Christian churches are called to a social mission that helps dismantle traditional politics. Their response involves disentangling their institutions and communities from traditional political networks and providing all Christians with political education towards the good of all, especially those oppressed by traditional politics. Dutertismo’s implicit religious perspective challenges Christianity’s evangelizing mission. Insufficiently discussed in many studies, this underlying Manichean perspective common to populists attracts many through an account of and a strategy against social suffering through the war between the good “we” versus the evil “others.” Christianity then must listen more attentively to the yearnings of the suffering people and accompany them more faithfully in the struggle for social transformation. These responses prepare Philippine Christianity to commemorate in 2021 its five-century presence.

Moço em estado de sítio: ruptura e experimentação em tempos de ditadura

O presente artigo pretende apresentar alguns aspectos estéticos e dramatúrgicos da peça Moço em estado de sítio, de Oduvaldo Vianna Filho. A peça representa um salto qualitativo na produção dramatúrgica de um autor que sempre se debruçou sobre as contradições de nossa sociedade, tentando entendê-las, e a elas respondeu com uma obra consciente e empenhada na luta pela transformação social. Ao confrontar seus personagens com a realidade objetiva, demonstra que sua vinculação com as forças materiais condiciona dialeticamente seu desenvolvimento humano. As formas dramatúrgicas revelam tais condições, numa relação metonímica, visando a desvendar as contradições sociais e, com isso, revelar o caráter do personagem em seu processo de formação e atuação política. A peça inaugura um ciclo (Moço em estado de sítio, Mão na luva, Papa Highirte e Rasga coração) que têm no flashback sua técnica de composição e aprofundamento da utilização das formas do realismo psicológico e realismo dialético.

Contemplation and Social Transformation: The Example of Thomas Merton

This essay examines the relationship between the Christian tradition of contemplation and social action. It takes as its paradigm the life and writings of Thomas Merton (Fr Louis), an American Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, who became one of the most widely-read and influential spiritual writers as well as Christian social commentators of the mid-twentieth century. Merton, who often wrote through an autobiographical medium, gradually moved away from an early emphasis on contemplative withdrawal to a belief that the monastic life is a form of counter-cultural solidarity with those who struggle for social transformation and justice. The essay more broadly explores the theological basis for a coherence of mysticism and action in contrast to some misinterpretations of the Christian language of interiority. It concludes with an exploration of the relationship between contemplation and politics in a number of twentieth and twenty-first century theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The American Cistercian monk and social activist Thomas Merton (1915-1968) has been described as one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century. He merited this description partly because, while a Roman Catholic, he embraced a generous “catholicity” beyond the boundaries of a single institution (cf. Mursell 2001:340).

Some Varieties of Utopian Method

This article opens with H.G. Wells's assertion that utopia is the distinctive and proper method of sociology. It outlines four ways of thinking about utopia which imply different methods, distinguishing a hermeneutic method from the imaginary reconstitution of society. The author finds common ground with Wright in exploring and endorsing the role of utopia, utopias and utopianism in transforming capitalism into something better. But this article focuses on two areas of difference: Wright's reliance on extrapolation from prefigurative practices, and the state–economy–civil society model that underpins Wright's work. It argues that we should take imagination and the imaginary reconstitution of society more seriously as tools in the struggle for social transformation.

The constitutional dynamism of a multilingual language policy: A case of South Africa

This article provides an intertextual understanding of language policy text which could be considered as a constitutional text. The concept of intertextuality is used in this article to analyse the factors that play a role in language policy decisions and its resultant implementation. The South African language policy is used as an example of such a constitutional text. Recent developments in language planning, policy and implementation in South Africa have led to a view that language policy is a text that is in a constant state of productivity, and it is always in a state of change and transformation. The results of this study show that a multilingual language policy such as that of South Africa has an internal textual space that carries a plurality of meaning of good and justice. It also expresses pluralism in society. Externally, a multilingual policy text has an active relationship through dialogue with other public interpretations and is open to struggles for social transformation.

What Do We Mean by Law and Social Transformation?.

AbstractIn Canada the entrenchment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms generated a good deal of debate about the possibility of using law in the struggle for social transformation. Although couched in general terms, the current debate is ultimately about the possibility of asserting liberal democratic legal rights in courts in order to transform existing relations of subordination and domination. Somewhat remarkably, the positive claim that litigating entrenched legal rights encourages social transformation tends to be made almost exclusively at the theoretical level. Theoretical possibilities, rather than concrete victories, are invoked to support the claim for the transformative capacity of liberal legal rights. Instead of approaching the question of litigating social change from an exclusively theoretical perspective, this paper examines contemporary examples in order to illustrate some of the possibilities of and limits to this strategy. Specifically, the paper examines how both the labour and women's movements have used the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to further their social, political and economic goals. Not only did these two groups adopt widely different strategies during the entrenchment process, what is entailed by the assertion of bourgeois legal rights has a different meaning for each. Thus, by contrasting the experience of the labour and women's movements in invoking the Charter it is possible to begin to suggest the limits of liberal rights in the struggle for social transformation.