Browsing by Subject "Social movements"
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Item Advancing women in education: Colorado State Normal School and the University of Colorado, 1870-1920(2012-05) Brackett, Shawn; Jacob, Stacy A.; Adams, Gretchen A.State normal schools were sites of and contributors to a major shift in American society from 1870 to 1920. At the beginning of the period, women’s role in society was legally, socially, and educationally enforced to be separate from and subservient to men’s role. The literature focuses on social movements, women’s roles, and histories of women’s colleges and state universities. However, very little exists exploring state normal schools, let alone the connections between state normal schools, women, and society. This study, therefore, addresses to what extent state normal schools contributed or reflected women’s advancement in education and society. Colorado State Normal School and the University of Colorado provided a case for investigating the experiences of women students and extrapolating larger patterns. State normal schools, although established to address practical needs for additional, better-prepared teachers across the country, fostered a growing challenge to social mores by women students and faculty. Throughout the period, the state normal schools provided the space and resources for women to learn, share, and connect with one another. Compared to state universities, state normal schools provided more enrollment and employment opportunities, developing a sense of group consciousness. Created to enforce and continue the assumed role of women as teachers (and only that), state normal schools significantly contributed to the overall advancement of women in education and society.Item Alternative to co-opted: An examination of the trajectory of the hospice movement(2011-05) Platt, Chelsea; Dunham, Charlotte C.; Wasserman, Jason; Miller, Peggy G.Hospice began as a movement that was critical of the treatment of terminal patients within traditional medicine and its cure-oriented logic arguing that traditional medical practices and policies can be dehumanizing for the terminally ill (Dubois 1980; Munley 1983; Stoddard 1991; Levy 1994). The progressive and alternative ideals of the early hospice movement were loaded with political issues and challenged an assumed logic within traditional medicine. The movement then shifted the majority of its energies towards the growth and organization of hospice facilities. The transition from medical movement to a medical organization or service does not seem inevitable or natural given its critical origins. Historical accounts of the movement’s development have highlighted the perceived need for an alternative way of dying and more recent studies document the current practices of hospice, but a complete narrative from movement to organization seems to be lacking. The purpose of this paper is to examine the transition of hospice from an alternative to accepted ideology and the movement’s relationship with traditional medicine. Through a systematic analysis of The Hospice Journal, the official National Hospice Organization’s publication from 1985-2001, a theoretical understanding of this movement’s unique trajectory is be developed.Item The atypical environmentalist : the rhetoric of environmentalist identity and citizenship in the Texas coal plant opposition movement(2013-12) Thatcher, Valerie Lynn; Brummett, Barry, 1951-Many contemporary grassroots environmental campaigns do not begin in urban areas but in small towns, rural enclaves, and racially or economically disadvantaged communities. Citizens with no previous activist experience or association with the established environmental movement organize to fight industry-created degradation in their communities, such as coal-fired power plants in Texas, the focus of this dissertation. The Texas coal plant opposition movement is identified as sites of environmental justice, particularly as discriminatory practices against sparsely populated communities. The movement’s collaborative efforts are defined as a new category of counterpublic, co-counterpublic, due to the discrete organizations’ shared focus and common purpose. The concept that a growing number of environmental activists are atypical is advanced; atypical environmentalists often engage in environmental practices while rejecting traditional environmentalist language and identity to avoid stigmatization as tree-huggers, extremists, or affluent whites. Presented are rhetorical analyses of identity negotiation and modalities of public enactments of citizenship within the Texas coal plant opposition movement and a critique of plant proponent hegemonic discourses. Research focused on five sites of coal plant opposition in Texas, gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and through a compilation of mediated materials. Asen’s discourse theory of citizenship was used to analyze the data for instances of rhetorical negotiation of environmentalist identity in politically conservative and in ethnically marginalized communities, their localized performances as public citizens, and the collaborative processes between established environmental groups and discrete local organizations. Texas anti-coal activists engaged in what Asen called hybrid citizenship; activists were primarily motivated toward enacted citizenship by a sense of betrayal by authorities. Issue and identity framing theories were implemented to critique rhetorical strategies used by plant proponents. In order to silence the opposition, plant supporters marginalized local anti-coal activists using what Cloud called identity frames by foil; proponents borrowed derogatory rhetorics from well-established anti-environmentalist discourse through which they self-identified positively by framing opponents as Other. The means through which proponents deflected their responsibility to the community by promoting technological solutions to pollution and deferring authority to industry executives and government agencies is analyzed within Chong and Druckman’s competing frames and frames in communication theories.Item Autonomy road : the cultural politics of Chicana/o autonomous organizing in Los Angeles, California(2011-08) Gonzalez, Pablo, active 21st century 1976-; Flores, Richard R.Since 1994, Chicana/o artists, musicians, and activists have been in dialogue with the Zapatista indigenous movement of Chiapas, Mexico. Such a transnational bridge has resonated in a new and unique form of Chicana/o cultural politics centered on the Zapatista concept of “autonomy” and “autonomous organizing.” In Los Angeles, California, this brand of “Chicana/o urban Zapatismo,” as I refer to it in the dissertation, is symbolic of recent political and cultural organizing efforts by Chicanos to combat housing gentrification, economic restructuring, racial and ethnic cleansing, environmental pollution in low-income areas, and mass anti-immigrant hysteria. This dissertation contends that Chicana/o urban Zapatismo is a result of various local, statewide, national, and international social justice movements that embrace the global trend in urban and rural areas towards constructing locally rooted participatory and democratic methods of organizing that are “horizontal” and that mobilize against such far-reaching social forces as racism and global capitalism. Using ethnographic data and interviews collected between 2005 to 2007, this dissertation maps the emergence of Chicana/o urban Zapatismo by tracing its historical origins to the changing social, political, and economic conditions of ethnic Mexican communities in Los Angeles, California; capturing the everyday internal and external tensions between one primarily working class Chicano autonomous collective, the Eastside Café ECHOSPACE in El Sereno, California; offering the case study of the South Central Farm, a 14-acre Mexican and Latino immigrant community garden; and charting the trans-border organizing of Chicana/o urban Zapatistas surrounding the most recent Zapatista-initiated project, “the Mexican Other Campaign”. These four distinct case studies converge in Los Angeles in the creation of a unique political process referred to as “urban Zapatismo”. This ethnographic study suggests that by uncovering the everyday relationships and tensions between Chicana/o urban Zapatistas in Los Angeles and the communities they live in, researchers looking at the production of different forms of racisms and structural inequalities in urban areas may derive a greater understanding of social (re)organization and mobilization by a growing, diverse, and historically marginalized group like Chicanos in the United States.Item Beyond obesity : historical, social change approaches to improve the fitness of Americans(2014-08) Harrell, Baker Christian; Todd, JanAmerica's growing concern about fatness during the twentieth century developed in parallel with a society that made it increasingly harder to live a healthy lifestyle. Since the 1970s, sweeping political, economic, cultural, and familial changes have occurred in the United States. Many researchers argue that these changes have created an "obesogenic" environment that has contributed to the increased prevalence of overweight and obesity in America by favoring inactivity and the over consumption of highly-processed, calorie-dense foods and beverages. As a result, the field of public health has increasingly begun to recognize obesity as a "societal disease." In 2001, The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity categorized the number of overweight and obese Americans as reaching "nationwide epidemic proportions." Since that time, America has waged an all-out "war on obesity." Instead of a broader emphasis on health promotion, some public health researchers have suggested that this heightened focus on obesity is 1) guided by America's historically-rooted social disdain for fatness and 2) insufficient to improve the healthy lifestyles of Americans. In searching for a solution to the so-called "obesity epidemic," a growing number of researchers have begun to look to models of social change. After an introductory chapter describing the scope of the problem, this dissertation provides an historical analysis of two, relevant social change models. The first historical case study is an examination of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's VERB social marketing campaign. The second study explores the model of social movements through the history of the aerobics "boom" of 1970s America. Based on these histories, this dissertation concludes by proposing a blended approach that harnesses the strengths of both models to organize and advance America's healthy living movement.Item Biketivists, hipsters, and spandex queens : bicycle politics and cultural critique in Austin(2011-05) Ronald, Kirsten Marie; Davis, Janet M.; Engelhardt, ElizabethThis paper uses an interdisciplinary, multiperspectival approach to analyze biketivism and various anticapitalist biketivist projects in Austin, Texas, in the hopes that a “glocalized” exploration of past and current biketivist struggles can help locate potential sites for political agency in ways that more placeless rhetorical studies cannot. Because the form and content of present-day bike politics in Austin are heavily dependent on biketivism’s historically tense articulations with capitalism, a historical analysis of biketivism as an outgrowth of Progressive Era and Appropriate Technology narratives reveals its crystallization around issues of technological, spatial, and social politics. Three case studies then apply this framework to different sites within the Austin bike community: the sales rhetoric of pro-custom bike shops, the debates over installing a Bike Boulevard in downtown Austin, and the missions and forms of several bike-related cultural organizations. Together, these perspectives on Austin’s bike community indicate that the incorporation (and sometimes outright co-optation) of biketivists’ technological and spatial demands and practices into mainstream culture may fragment the movement into physical and social agendas, but this fragmentation does not necessarily silence biketivism’s more radical social politics. At least in Austin, co-optation of biketivism may paradoxically be helping biketivists meet their goal of bringing (pedal) power to the people.Item Charting contemporary Chamoru activism : anti-militarization & social movements in Guåhan(2013-08) Naputi, Tiara Rose; Cloud, Dana L.This project examines social movements in Guåhan (Guam) and activism within this unincorporated territory of U.S. Two assumptions guide this work. First, Guåhan is the site of rhetorical struggle over identity, indigeneity, and Americanness. Second, indigenous Chamoru (Chamorro) struggles must be examined within the historical context of colonial projects, which have established a political economy of stratification. Thus, the complexities of social movement organizing might be better understood when historicized with political and economic realities. To get a more complete understanding of how indigenous social movements and activism in contemporary Guåhan are shaped by understandings of national identity, colonization, and military buildup, I analyze three sets of artifacts: (1) testimonies at United Nations from 2005-2012; (2) the texts and activities of the group We Are Guåhan and its legal action against the Department of Defense (DOD) regarding the U.S. military buildup; and (3) interviews with social movement members and organizers regarding activism in Guåhan and contending with American influence. The project argues that resistance takes place through social movement efforts centered on the issues of ancestral land, language and cultural revitalization, and self-determination for Chamorus; and these moments occur primarily through actions that both depend upon and reinforce communicative channels directed against the U.S. nation-state. This phenomenon is articulated through the rhetoric of both/neither that demonstrates complex and contradictory identities positioned as both part of the U.S. while simultaneously remaining exterior to it.Item Crucible of conflict : abortion rights organizing in Texas(2016-12) Stevenson, Amanda Jean; Potter, Joseph E.; Pettit, Elizabeth; Johnson-Hanks, Jennifer; Young, Michael P; Vaz de Melo , Pedro O.S.; Cavanagh, Shannon EThis dissertation uses digital records of a massive online conversation among opponents of an abortion restriction bill in Texas during summer 2013. It describes the geography of the participants, investigates the role of emotions and social ties in shaping engagement, and describes a radical change in the way movement participants talked about their aims. Theoretically, it approaches the investigation of abortion rights organizing from the perspective of both social movement studies and the sociological and demographic study of reproductive health. Methodologically, it employs a hybrid of computational and qualitative techniques to analyze a very large dataset.Item Defending Pussy Riot metonymically : the trial representations, media and social movements in Russia and the United States(2013-05) Kolesova, Ekaterina Sergeyevna; Cloud, Dana L.During August 2012 the issues of women's rights in Russia attracted attention of the U.S. newspapers, which was an unusual occurrence for this unprivileged region in feminist theorizing. In my thesis I explore the rhetoric around the Pussy Riot trial and verdict. I argue that international media rendered the protest metonymically, thereby reducing its political content to human rights and Cold War frames. I explore the usage of historical references in the narratives, based on these paradigms. The oppressiveness of the Russian government is constructed through Cold War rhetoric by references to Stalinism, which masks the neoliberal content of this case. The confrontation is represented as a clash of cultures based on the contrast between democracy and oppressive regimes, with Pussy Riot as martyrs for Western values and Putin as an Oriental dictator. I argue that this rhetoric has troubling implications for social activism, that democracy could be only achieved through non-violent and individualist symbolic activism which relies on the Western standards. The second part of my thesis analyzes how social movements in the U.S. and Russia interact with each other and influence each other's tactics through interaction with media representations of the Pussy Riot trial and dominant narratives regarding activism. My support for this argument comes from an analysis of the U.S. and Russian movements' responses to the Pussy Riot trial. Embracing a complex combination of political meanings, these events were significantly determined by prolific mass media coverage and mediated interaction between activist groups.Item Digital intifada : a discourse analysis of the Palestine solidarity groups in social media(2016-08) Almahmoud, Meshaal Abdullah; Atkinson, Lucinda; Love, BradfordThis thesis investigates the discourse adopted by Palestine solidarity groups utilizing Facebook. Three pro-Palestine groups were highlighted as a case study for this thesis: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, International Solidarity Movement and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. The research questions address the methods of discourse Palestinian solidarity groups' employ, utilization of different contents and themes, level of engagement, selection of format, news resources, and impact of 2014 Gaza war. This study analyzes variations among the three groups and components influencing differentiations. The literature review highlights transformation in both individual and collective communication and social media's changing social and political structures. Research includes the usage of social media to frame social movements’ platform and social media benefits for collective action and how framing is achieved and collective identity developed. Lastly, it illuminates the trend of connective action and personalization. The discourse analysis approach was applied to investigate the set of selected Facebook posts in 2014. The results show that the three solidarity groups generally applied resource mobilization theory. Posts reporting some form of a violation contained the most correlating content. Human rights theme rose to the majority of the total number of posts. The most used contents in the posts aim for audience sympathy, responsibility and being connected, as for a shared pursuit to occur. Reporting a violation, the most used content, triggers sympathy. Responsibility is motivated by calling followers for action, which is the second most used content by all groups. Reporting news as applied to many types of top used contents, resulted in the group member's feeling connected. The total average engagement for the three groups multiplied highly during the war in Gaza, but sank considerably after termination of the war. However, the average engagement subsequent to the war remains markedly higher than pre-war levels. The patterns of posting revealed tendencies not to post only text, without attaching another format. Posts with links or photo account for a higher proportion. The majority of the three solidarity groups' news resources come from five pro-Palestinian major news websites. Yet, numerous international sources, either mainstream or independent media, were utilized as well.Item Exploring the use of Facebook as a communication tool in agricultural-related social movements(2010-12) Graybill, Mica P; Meyers, Courtney; Doerfert, David; Irlbeck, EricaA social movement is a personal obligation taken on by an individual, due to either a personal experience or responsibility, to pursue action to implement a change in a community or society. Facebook is a social networking device in which users interact through conversations, and build relationships by networking with other users. Facebook groups are created as part of a smaller community within the social networking site and focus on particular interests or beliefs about certain issues that are shared by users. The purpose of this study was to determine why individuals use social media, specifically Facebook, to communicate information in social movements related to agricultural issues. Eight interviews were conducted with Facebook participants who actively contribute to the promotion of a social movement through the social networking site. Interview questions were asked to address the five research objectives for the study. Results found that participants said they are successful in using Facebook to promote the social movements they represent. Participants are personally motivated to actively recruit and participate in Facebook as an informational and promotional communication channel. Though participants primarily promote their message through Facebook, they also use other social media tools to help reach as many people as possible. Overall, participants have been pleased with the outcome of their Facebook groups, and offer advice for future practitioners who want to use social media to promote agricultural movements.Item The family and the making of women's rights activism in Lebanon(2009-05) Stephan, Rita Toufic; Charrad, M. (Mounira)This research explores how Lebanese women's rights activists use their kinship system to pursue citizenship rights and political recognition. Building on social movements, social capital, and feminist theories, I argue that Lebanese women's rights activists leverage support from their kin groups and adhere to the behavioral norms set by the kinship system in order to gain access, build capacity and advance their movement's goals and strategies. In investigating the impact of being embedded in--or autonomous from--kinship structure on activism, my research suggests that Lebanese women's rights activists interact with their kin groups at three levels. Firstly, at the level of becoming an activist, some women obtain direct support and encouragement from their nuclear and extended family, while others rise through alternative networks such as membership in a political party or a professional union. At the personal strategies level, some activists utilize their family support and kinship networks to establish their activist identities and facilitate their civic engagement, while others use collegial and professional networks. Finally, on the organizational level, women's rights organizations pursue women's empowerment in the context of their role in the family, dissolving the divide between women's rights in the sphere of legal equality and women's rights within the family. Women's relation to kinship is significant in explaining how they form their activist identity and construct their activism, regardless whether they use embedded or autonomous strategies. Activists receive empowerment and support from the family in advancing their goals and consider family members as important forces in shaping their journeys to activism. In the same vein, the kinship system contributes to determining actors' social status at the outset; its networks potentially grant activists access to the public sphere; and its name and ties endows activists with public trust and respect. Lebanese activists expand on the capabilities provided for them by their kin groups to enhance women’s status in their public as well as private roles.Item The foundations of Red Power : The National Indian Youth Council 1968-1973(2013-12) Jenkins, James Fitzhugh; Bsumek, Erika MarieThe period from 1969 until 1973 represented the height of “Red Power” for American Indians. Pan-tribal activists participated in hundreds of demonstrations and dozens of militant takeovers demanding tribal sovereignty. The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was at the forefront of this period of direct action even though it continued to receive funding for educational programs and advocated reform through legal means. Operating under an entirely new leadership, the NIYC of the early 1970s resembled the Youth Council of the mid-1960s by continuing to balance indirect action and legal reform with direct action and militant language. But by the end of 1973, the Youth Council ceased supporting direct action as a legitimate tactic for pressuring social change. By 1973 it became clear that pan-tribal protests could quickly upset the gains that American Indians were making in federal reform. Wealthy benefactors funded the NIYC throughout the period, but they never overtly pushed the Youth Council into a more moderate direction. Instead, outside funding increased the NIYC’s operational space and allowed it to gain a modicum of power within the federal agency responsible for Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The NIYC found itself able to pressure the BIA into negotiating on a range of issues, and the NIYC developed allies that shared its goals and ideology within the agency. However, the NIYC’s continued ability to negotiate with the federal government was vulnerable to controversy, and the highly confrontational episodes led by the American Indian Movement (AIM) tended to upset the pace of reform within the federal government. AIM’s 1972 takeover of the BIA national headquarters and AIM’s 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee created setbacks for the NIYC even as the events garnered national attention and support. Moreover, the political climate became receptive to supporting the self-determination of tribal governments, and pan-tribal organizations like the NIYC had to shift their focus in the context of newly empowered tribes. Foundation support allowed the NIYC to help open the way for tribes to negotiate with the U.S. state directly, and this very success made pan-tribal demonstrations increasingly obsolete by the mid-1970s.Item A fragmented paradise : the politics of development and land use on the Caribbean coast of Honduras(2012-08) Loperena, Christopher Anthony; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Costa Vargas, João; Visweswaran, Kamala; Gordon, Edmund T.; Arroyo-Martinez, JossiannaBased on two years of multi-sited ethnographic research, the dissertation investigates Garifuna struggles over racial and cultural identity and land rights against the backdrop of neoliberal tourism development on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Garifuna are descended from Africans and the Carib Indians of St. Vincent; they are a transnational people with roots in Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Guatemala and several cities in the United States. The dissertation examines the conditions under which some Garifuna embrace the opportunities offered through state-backed tourism projects and explores why others reject tourism development altogether, choosing instead, to assign greater priority to autonomy and territorial rights. Garifuna who oppose state-sanctioned tourism projects are positioned as adversaries of the state who are incapable of harnessing the power of development and, in turn, barred from traditional channels of participation. In this vein, the development apparatus delivers land rights activists a double bind—Garifuna culture is a commodity necessary for the growth of the national tourism industry, but not a basis for expansive rights. Finally, the dissertation analyzes the ethical debates that animate Garifuna land politics in the struggle to wrest authority from the state and local entrepreneurs over the processes of development. Garifuna cultural traits that tend toward the collectivistic, toward the valorization of ancestral practices, or toward the autonomous development of their communities are defined as culturally “conservative.” I argue Garifuna culture is commodified in accordance with the racial structuration of Honduran society, which has deep effects at the community level, resulting in fragmentation and dispossession. This work sheds light on the everyday politics of autonomy in Triunfo de la Cruz—a Garifuna village situated on the white-sand beaches of Tela Bay—and reveals how notions of communal belonging are defined through processes of political struggle.Item From being silenced to using silence: new strategies for local advocacy(Texas Tech University, 2003-05) Tisserand, Kara ENot availableItem Global and local civil society and state repression in conflict areas(2016-08) Swed, Ori; Weinreb, Alexander; Adut, Ari, 1971-; Ekland-Olson, Sheldon; Butler, John Sibley; Barany, ZoltanThe last 30 years witnessed the consolidation of the Human Rights Regime as the regulating mechanism for human rights norms in the domestic and international spheres. In my dissertation, I examine the Human Rights Regime efficacy when dealing with complex situations that involved high cost for participating states. Particularly, I examine how the Human Rights Regime’s agents of change—nongovernmental organizations (NGO) and social movements—lowering state repression in conflict areas. I argue that the presence and actions of NGOs have the potential of mitigating state repression, even within the harshest setting of operation of war torn areas. My research is informed by literature on third party intervention, social movements outcomes, and the global civil society and human rights. I use a mixed-methods approach, including quantitative analyses, interviews, and a spatial analysis. The first chapter presents a wide perspective on the correlation between the nongovernmental sector and state repression as measured by two types of human right indexes, the Political Terror Scale and Freedom House, focusing on a sample of 1670 organizations across 138 countries. The second and third chapters explore the mechanism of this impact by focusing on two particular cases in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using interviews and a spatial analysis. The first examines the effect of a women Israeli movement that monitors the Israeli roadblocks on movement restrictions. The analysis takes into account both the movements and the soldiers’ outlooks by analyzing the activists’ daily reports from 2005 to 2015 in a textual analysis format and interviews with 29 soldiers that were stationed in roadblocks during that period to complement it. The second episode examines events during the 2014 Gaza War, using a Geo-spatial UN data damage report of the conflict, including 22,745 data points. Counting damage reports, the analysis compares the relative safety of UN facilities in relation to other sensitive facilities during the conflict. Results underscore the mitigating effect of the nongovernmental sector and social movements over state repression.Item Going green : sustainable mining, water, and the remaking of social protest in post-neoliberal Ecuador(2012-12) Velásquez, Teresa Angélica; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ghosh, Kaushik; Sawyer, Suzana; Speed, Shannon; Vargas, Joao HThis dissertation examines the reconfiguration of popular environmental politics in the context of so-called sustainable mining development in Ecuador. Progressive governments in Latin America herald sustainable mining initiatives as the lynchpin to development capable of generating revenues to finance social welfare programs and protecting the environment. If this is so, my dissertation asks, then why has a proposed sustainable gold mine provoked such bitter opposition from dairy farmers in the parish of Victoria del Portete? My dissertation follows a group of indigenous and mestizo dairy farmers in the southern Ecuadorian Andes to understand why they oppose gold mining in their watershed and traces the cultural and political transformations that followed from their activism. I make four key arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that sustainable mining plans place a premium on local water resources and have the effect of rearticulating local water disputes. Whereas owners of small and large dairy farms have historically disputed local access to water resources now they have created a unified movement against the proposed gold mine project. Second, I argue that knowledge practices and political discourses enabled farmers with varying claims to ethnic ancestry and socio-economic standing to establish connections with each other and with national indigenous leaders, Catholic priests, artists, and urban ecologists. Together they have formed a movement in defense of life. My analysis extends common understandings of the nature of human agency and political life by examining the role that non-human entities play in shaping contemporary environmental politics. Third, as a result of the mobilizations, new socio-environmental formations have emerged. The watershed has become a sacred place called Kimsacocha, which is venerated by farmers through new cultural practices as the source of life. Finally, the mobilizations in defense of life have re-centered indigeneity in unexpected ways. Farmers with and without indigenous ancestry as well as their urban allies are now claiming an indigenous identity. Unlike previous understandings of identity in the region, indigeneity does not denote a shared racial, cultural, or class position but refers to a particular way of understanding and relation to the environment.Item Grievances matter : unemployment and the decline of the piquetero movement (2003-2007)(2011-05) Perez, Marcos Emilio; Auyero, Javier; Auyero, Javier; Young, MichaelThe unemployed workers movement in Argentina (also known as the piqueteros) emerged during the mid 1990s, as a response to the increasing poverty and unemployment produced by the economic reforms implemented by the national government. Its extraordinary growth and leading role in the protests of 2001-2002 led many scholars to believe that it would become an enduring aspect of Argentina’s politics. However, after 2002, the movement entered a period of decline, which was reflected in the loss of members, support, and public influence. In this paper, I study the trajectory of this movement in order to advance certain arguments regarding the relation between grievances and collective action. I will argue that a key factor behind the decline of the movement was the amelioration of the main grievance which gave it rise. The emergence and consolidation of the piqueteros coincided with a period of increasing unemployment. However, after 2002, Argentina’s economy entered a phase of intense growth which significantly improved labor market conditions. The new scenario deeply affected the movement’s influence. Therefore, the study of the piqueteros can provide significant insight about social movement theory. In particular, it suggests that the relation between grievances and collective action is more direct than what the resource mobilization and political process approaches predict. In other words, the case of the piqueteros shows that grievances matter: although several factors may mediate between them and collective action, their effect is never negligible. In addition, this paper addresses a more “empirical” gap. Although there is an increasing body of literature about the decline of the piquetero movement, most studies focus on political variables and neglect the potential role played by the reduction in unemployment. In other words, in exploring the causes of this downfall, authors usually center on the emergence of a new government in 2003, the divisions between different organizations, and the loss of legitimacy among other sectors of society. By focusing on an alternative explanation, I expect to contribute to the understanding of this movement.Item Groundings in anti-racism : racist violence and the 'War-on-Terror' in East London(2011-05) Ambikaipaker, Mohan; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Foley, Douglas E.; Gordon, Edmund T.; Carrington, BenThe interlocked social struggles waged by overlapping and diverse Britons of color for racial and social equality and everyday survival is the dynamic corollary of the contradictions engendered by the ruling relations of racial differentiation and racism in Britain. Grassroots struggles against routine racist violence and state violence, conceptualized as politically interlinked, are the critical sites that contribute to the recursive racial domination experienced by Britons of color in contemporary Britain, and forms the key ethnographic research focus of this study. Prior studies have already critiqued the dominant state framework of viewing racist violence as random, de-racialized and nonpolitical events – as individual incidents, neighborhood disputes, inter-personal conflict, and robberies gone wrong. These studies have alternately identified the social dehumanizing functions of racist violence, the possessive local white territorialism that they materially support and their relationship with macro-level socio-economic crises and changing racial exclusion ideologies of the liberal democratic nation. What I add to these studies is the argument that the racial subordination and ruling relations inherent in the social processes of racist violence and, by formal extension, state violence are not only derivative of broader ideological forces or local social relations but are in fact constitutive of white racial state formation in Britain’s postcolonial era. I argue that the processes of racist violence and state violence are productive of the domination and hierarchy that is secured for whites, through unevenly empowered and routinized contestations within the re-configurations of white racial state formation and an emergent neoliberal-multicultural national security state. It is within this framework of analysis that the politics of black mobilization by Britons of color and their allies, in the context of contemporary multiculturalism’s contradictions, and against the many-sided form of racial subordination is made legible -- not as an anachronism -- but as socially meaningful, interlocked and politically urgent.Item A harbor in the tempest: megaprojects, identity, and the politics of place in Gwadar, Pakistan(2014-05) Jamali, Hafeez Ahmed; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-This dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which Pakistani government’s attempts to initiate large-scale infrastructure development projects in Balochistan Province have transformed its social and political landscape. Ethnographically, the study focuses on Gwadar, a small coastal town in Pakistan’s western Balochistan Province to show how colonial and postcolonial projects of progress and development suppress or subsume other kinds of lived geographies and imaginations of place. Keeping in mind the centrality of everyday experiences in generating social forms, this dissertation describes how development, transnationalism, and ethnic identity are (re)configured. It is based on ethnographic encounters that foreground the lived experiences and imaginations of fishermen from Med kinship and occupational group who occupy a subaltern position within the local status hierarchy in Gwadar. On the one hand, the promise of becoming modern citizens of the future mega city incites new desires and longings among those fishermen that facilitate their incorporation into emergent regimes of labor and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, Pakistani security forces have tightened their control over the local population by establishing a cordon sanitaire around Gwadar Port and the town. These mechanisms of control have disrupted local fishermen`s experiences of place and intimate sociality and introduced elements of exclusion, fear, and paranoia. By interrupting the fishermen`s expectations of their rightful place in the city, it compels them to think of alternate ways to confront the state’s development agenda, including peaceful protest and armed struggle. The dissertation concludes, tentatively, that the imposition of political violence by state authorities that accompanies the structural violence of mega infrastructure projects tends to create a mirror effect whereby the victims of development adopt a language of violence and a different idiom of identity.
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