This book presents a new explanation of the rise, development and demise of social movements and cycles of protest in autocracies; the conditions under which protest becomes rebellion; and the impact of protest and rebellion on democratization. Focusing on poor indigenous villages in Mexico's authoritarian regime, the book shows that the spread of US Protestant missionaries and the competition for indigenous souls motivated the Catholic Church to become a major promoter of indigenous movements for land redistribution and indigenous rights. The (...) book explains why the outbreak of local rebellions, the transformation of indigenous claims for land into demands for ethnic autonomy and self-determination, and the threat of a generalized social uprising motivated national elites to democratize. Drawing on an original dataset of indigenous collective action and on extensive fieldwork, the empirical analysis of the book combines quantitative evidence with case studies and life histories. (shrink)

This contribution traces the parallel development of two distinct approaches to peasant agroecological education: the peasant-to-peasant horizontal method that disseminated across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean beginning in the 1970s, and the political-agroecological training schools of combined consciousness-building and skill-formation that have been at the heart of the educational processes of member organizations of La Via Campesina since the 1990s. Applying a theoretical framework that incorporates territorial struggle, agroecology and popular education, we examine spatial and organizational aspects of each of (...) these models for peasant education and movement-building. Recognizing that the models, their respective contexts, and the dialectical relationships therein have been in constant evolution, we share findings on the movement-place as a territorial system with socio-historical subjectivity, that is, peasant movements as territorially-embedded, collective historical actors. This leads to some conclusions in moving past educational theory that has centered upon individual subjects, and approaching a conception of territory as a subject of learning processes. (shrink)

First an overall view is provided of Lacey’s ideas concerning science in its relation with the values of popular movements, and of the World Social Forum. Then, as an exercise in the building of conceptual bridges betweeen philosophical and political discourses about science, an analysis is provided of a speech delivered by Brazil’s new minister for science and technology in the occasion of his taking office.Em primeiro lugar, apresenta-se uma visão geral das idéias de Lacey sobre a ciência em (...) sua relação com os valores dos movimentos populares, e do Fórum Social Mundial. A seguir, num exercício de construção de pontes conceituais entre o discurso filosófico e o político sobre a ciência, desenvolve-se uma análise do pronunciamento do novo titular do Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia do Brasil, feito por ocasião de sua posse. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain why the social movement had its historical origin in the 1760s. It argues that the rise of the social movement as a particular form of political action was closely linked to a new interpretation of sovereignty that emerged within eighteenth century British politics. This interpretation, which drew inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract thinking, not only resonated with the radicalism of John Wilkes and his followers’ struggle to promote civil liberties to Englishmen of (...) all classes, it also spurred a transformation of the repertoire of popular contention. The article traces the evolution of the concept of sovereignty in British political thought from the Restoration to the Wilkites and discusses how this evolution informed the contentious actions of the Wilkites as they formed the first mass movement to promote a specific political issue. (shrink)

Originally published 1965. This reprints the 1977 edition which included a new introduction. From the starting point of "popular" charity education, the book traces the dynamic of ideological and social change from the 1790s to the 1830s in terms of attitudes to education and analyzes the range of contemporary opinions on popular education. It also examines some of the channels through which ideas about education were disseminated and became common currency in popular movements.

The squatting movement is a social movement that seeks to use unoccupied land or temporarily or permanently abandoned buildings as farmland, housing, meeting places, or centers for social and cultural purposes. Its main motivation is to denounce and at the same time respond to the economic difficulties that activists believe exist to realize the right to housing. Much of what we know about this movement comes from the informational and journalistic literature generated by actors that are close (...) or even belong to the movement. However, there is also a significant diversity of knowledge and scientific evidence on the squatters’ movement that is being produced by academia and that is worth knowing and grouping together. With the aim of defining and understanding how the squatters’ movement is constituted and organized, and how it acts, this research analyzes what the scientific literature affirms about it. Through qualitative research based on the systematic literature review method, information was sought in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The initial universe of 262 articles was finally reduced to a sample of 32 articles. These have been analyzed by means of a categorized classification content analysis. The results obtained allow us to establish the state of the art on the squatting movement, placing special emphasis on its dynamics of resistance, its process of political subjectivation and its mechanisms of action and self-management. The study suggests that the movement is understood based on collective actions with a political role of resistance to neoliberalism and the inequalities it generates, and of response to the basic and social needs of the communities through self-management.Systematic review registration[doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7179670], identifier [7179670]. (shrink)

This article’s subject is the theory and practice of ‘regional survey’, the method of social and environmental study associated with Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Despite being overlooked or dismissed in most accounts of early 20th-century social science, regional survey had a wide influence on the development of the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and human geography. Emerging from late 19th-century field biology, the regional survey came to typify a methodological moment in the natural and social sciences that favoured the (...) holistic analysis of geographically delimited areas. By the interwar period, the kinds of projects that went under its name can clearly be seen as forerunners of the post-Second World War tradition of community studies. Additionally, in its self-presentation as a civic, participatory exercise, the regional survey can be read as a form of popular autoethnography that contrasts with other, more familiar social-scientific ventures in the first half of the 20th century, and defies the dichotomy between ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘technical’ modes of social science. As a result, this article argues, the regional survey provides an alternative point of departure for thinking about the origins and development of the modern social sciences in Britain. (shrink)

O presente artigo, de natureza bibliográfica, objetiva discutir alguns desafios políticos e epistemológicos postos aos movimentos sociais e à educação popular no contexto das sociedades complexas. Parte-se do reconhecimento que estamos vivendo, nas últimas décadas, transformações profundas que impactam em todas as dimensões da vida tanto individual quanto social. Esses processos ocorrem em espaços locais, mas impactam globalmente, assim como existem tendências globalizantes que impactam nos espaços locais, na subjetividade e nas relações intersubjetivas. O incremento de tecnologias acelera esses (...) processos, trazendo implicações políticas, pedagógicas, sociais e culturais. Um conjunto de mudanças em curso ainda são de difícil avaliação dado que são movimentos em curso, mas, nem por isso, deixam de colocar novas exigências epistêmicas e políticas, ou seja, as realidades emergentes sempre desafiam a construção de novos referenciais e novas práticas. Os movimentos sociais e a educação popular não estão imunes a essas influências. Daí o desafio para pensar o emergente atentando para o residual e o dominante, conforme propõe Raymond Williams, visto que estão profundamente imbricados. Nesse contexto, questiona-se a respeito das contribuições de referenciais clássicos, tanto das ciências sociais quanto pedagógicas, na análise da realidade e na fundamentação de projetos emancipatórios. Buscando dar conta dessas questões, o texto inicia contextualizando algumas tendências no âmbito do eixo temático “educação popular e movimentos sociais” tendo como base as dez edições da Anpedsul e segue com um diagnóstico das transformações em curso que tornam as sociedades complexas. Na sequência, são analisados alguns desafios políticos e epistemológicos visando a dar conta de uma compreensão mais ampla dos complexos fenômenos emergentes e, para concluir, uma reflexão sobre o papel dos clássicos nas investigações e pesquisas relativas aos movimentos sociais e a educação popular. Palavras-chave: Movimentos sociais. Educação popular. Política. Epistemologia. Sociedades complexas. (shrink)

This article argues that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured through the late 1970s. These two varieties—Popular Front antifascism and anti-imperial antifascism—were in dialogue but in opposition to one another, and both were transnational mobilizing ideologies. Investigating these two antifascist movements allows us to place Europe in the wider world and demonstrate how anti-imperial activists of color simultaneously “provincialized” Europe and situated it within a global framework. The effort also highlights the need to (...) rethink the history of the European Left through the framework of antifascism. (shrink)

Ackelsberg investigates women’s activist participation in the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a Brooklyn association established in 1974–75, which she treats as a model of democratic civic engagement that incorporated differences while avoiding the exclusions of the past. The NCNW assisted poor and working class women in organizing to better meet their needs and those of their communities. It arose in response to the ways women were either ignored or belittled when they attempted to engage in political work both in (...) their communities and beyond. In working with each other, the women found that they needed to address issues of diversity. The programs they created to help build bridges across differences that helped facilitate their successful activism while, simultaneously, broadening their understanding of what constitutes “politics.”. (shrink)

The “local food” movement has been growing since at least the mid- twentieth century with the founding of the Rodale Institute. Since then, local food has increasingly become a goal of food systems. Today, books and articles on local food have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Barbara Kingsolver1 and Michael Pollan2 espousing the virtues of eating locally. Additionally, local food initiatives, such as the “farm- tofork,” “Buying Local,” and “Slow Food” have gained a strong international following (...) with clearly visible impacts on the food industry and policy. The numbers of local farmers’ markets, community- supported agriculture projects, and community gardens have been on the rise steadily since 1994. (shrink)

The avant-garde has been popular for some time, but its popularity has tended to fly under the radar. This ¿popular avant-garde,¿ conceived as the meeting ground of the avant-garde and popular, avoids the divorce of art and praxis of which the avant-garde has been accused. The Popular Avant-Garde takes stock of the debates about both the ¿historical¿ (¿modernist¿) and posterior avant-gardes, and sets them in relation to popular culture and art forms. With a critical introduction (...) that examines the concepts of ¿the avant-garde,¿ ¿the popular,¿ and ¿the popular avant-garde,¿ the series of essays analyzes the way in which the avant-garde employs popular genres for political purposes, as well as how the popular acquires a critical function with respect to the avant-garde. Each of the volume¿s three sections considers a different aspect of the productive exchange between the avant-garde and popular: the popular avant-garde as a culturally hybrid and cross-border phenomenon; the play between the popular avant-garde and developments in media and technology; and the popular avant-garde¿s upending of conventional ideas about ¿the people¿ and ¿the popular.¿ The Popular Avant-Garde takes a fresh look at the now canonical Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist movements from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, and cultural and critical theory, while at the same time exploring less well-known avant-garde work in literature, film, television, music, photography, dance, sculpture, and the graphic arts. This volume¿s coverage of the American and Afro-American, Luso-Brazilian and Latin-American, East-European, and Scandinavian avant-gardes, in addition to the vanguards of Spain and other parts of Western Europe, will appeal to all those interested in avant-garde and popular art forms. (shrink)

Science is a defining feature of the modern world, and popular science is where most of us make sense of that fact. Understanding Popular Science provides a framework to help understand the development of popular science and current debates about it. In a lively and accessible style, Peter Broks shows how popular science has been invented, redefined and fought over. From early-nineteenth century radical science to twenty-first century government initiatives, he examines popular science as an (...) arena where the authority of science and the authority of the state are legitimized and challenged. The book includes clear accounts of the public perception of scientists, visions of the future, fears of an anti-science movement and concerns about scientific literacy. The final chapter proposes a new model for understanding the interaction between lay and expert knowledge. This book is essential reading in cultural studies, science studies, history of science and science communication. (shrink)

Environmental historian Kevin Armitage’s new book offers welcome relief to readers grown weary of anthropocentrism versus nonanthropecentrism debates and Muir-Pinchot-Leopold “third way” arguments. It will also find a receptive audience among those who have maintained all along that education is the key to addressing our environmental woes. In the United States, environmental education has a vibrant history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a critical mass of policy makers, educators, scientists, and philosophers shared the belief that a curriculum (...) based on the careful observation and study of nature should be taught in primary and secondary school classrooms. The “nature study movement,” as it was called, advanced an ambitious agenda for education reform based on a simple theory: children who develop a deep and abiding interest in the natural world mature into environmentally conscious adults and good citizens. Organized thematically, Armitage’s book lays out the meaning of nature study as well as its scientific and sentimental interpretations (introduction and chap. 1), the influence of progressive education on nature study (chap. 2), the connection between recapitulation theory and nature study (chap. 3), nature study and bird conservation (chap. 4), school gardening as an extension of nature study (chap. 5), the growth of nature photography in tandem with nature study (chap. 6), and finally nature study’s role in promoting agricultural reform (chap. 7). In case the significance of this progressive-era movement is still in doubt, the movement’s legacy can still be felt, Armitage contends, in the ideas of perhaps two of the most influential environmental thinkers of the past century: Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson (conclusion). (shrink)

The Unfinished Revolution compares the post-Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements with an eye toward understanding how distinct political institutional environments affect the development, strategies, goals, and outcomes of a social movement. Stephen M. Engel utilizes an electic mix of source materials ranging from the theories of Mancur Olson and Michel Foucault to Supreme Court rulings and film and television dialogue. The two case study chapters function as brief historical sketches to elucidate (...) further the conclusions on theory and whilst being politically-oriented, they also examine gay influence and expansion into mainstream popular culture. The book also includes an appendix that surveys and assesses the analytical potential of five critical understandings of social movements: the classical approach, rational choice, resource mobilization, new social movement theories, and political opportunity structures. It will be of value to academics and students of sociology, political science, and history. (shrink)

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected or at (...) best treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

Esports’ rise in popularity has led the Olympic Movement (OM) to consider esports as a possible addition to the Olympic programme. A positive stance on the part of the OM towards certain aspects of esports has become apparent in recent years. However, the OM has expressly stated that while it is values-based, the esports industry is commercially driven. This article aims to take a tenable step towards the conceptualisation of the relationship between esports and ‘values’. Moreover, it weighs esports’ (...) potential addition to the Olympic programme in view of the commercialisation of the Olympic Games whilst also exploring the selection process for adding new sports to the programme. The article concludes that despite the OM’s negativity concerning the supposed lack of values in the esports industry, it ignores the commercialisation of the Olympic Games at its hands. Accordingly, it will further assert that esports will possibly become a part of the Olympic programme in the near future. (shrink)

I propose a theory of popular power, according to which a political order manifests popular power to the extent it robustly maintains an egalitarian basic structure. There are two parts to the theory. First, the power of a political order lies in the basic structure's robust self-maintenance. Second, the popularity of the political order’s power lies in the equality of relations between the society's members. I will argue that this theory avoids the perverse consequences of some existing radical (...) democratic theories of popular power which focus on mass expression, either in plebiscites or in social movements, as popular power's canonical instances. In particular, my theory does not valourise momentary expression over durable effect, and it offers a ready framework for conceptualising the sometimes-oligarchic substructure of the supposedly canonical instances of popular power. I will show that this theory has strong precedents within a certain republican tradition of political philosophy. (shrink)

The technological revolution and appropriation of internet tools began to reshape the material basis of society and the urban space in collaborative, grassroots, leaderless, and participatory actions. The protest squares’ representation on Television screens and mainstream media has been broad. Various health, governmental, societal, and urban challenges have marked the advent of the Covid-19 virus. Inequalities have become more salient as poor people and minorities are more affected by the virus. Social distancing makes the typical forms of protest impossible to (...) carry out. Under social distancing, some state-led policies took advantage of social media to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic to silence social and political activities, censor criticism, and control the press. However, during the pandemic era, the movements for social justice have been particularly active, focusing on defending workers’ rights, mutual aid and solidarity, monitoring policymakers, and popular education. These progressive movements combined concrete practices and experiences to confront the reactionary, capitalist, and governmental actors that sought to shape and envision the world. Through different case studies of protest movements during the pandemic in Europe, the UK, and Asia, this paper argues that at the time of rising racial, social, and economic inequalities, the social activities adapted to the circumstances determined by the social distancing and the impossibility of people gathering in physical spaces. Subsequently, the people in different countries had various individual and collective responses to the support of health workers, systemic inequalities, loss of jobs, and other societal and financial challenges imposed by the governments. It means that, rather than disappearing, the social movements have adapted to the unexpected situations during the pandemic outbreak. The pandemic broke the new digital global wave of protests in this sense. (shrink)

Resumo: Este texto busca abordar o pensamento de Rosa Luxemburgo a partir da idéia fundamental que sustenta toda sua concepção de política: a noção de que a participação ativa das massas é a base de qualquer processo político e é essencial nos processos revolucionários. Esta idéia nos encaminha para a compreensão da política em Rosa Luxemburgo como aquisição de autonomia popular e é também o cerne de suas idéias acerca de um modelo de socialismo democrático, atravessando sua obra como (...) um todo e repercutindo, até os dias de hoje, na dinâmica política de muitos movimentos sociais e em partes da esquerda contemporâneos.Palavras-chave: socialismo - marxismo - autonomia popular - revolução.: This work aims to approach Rosa Luxemburg's thought from the fundamental idea that sustains her entire political conception: the notion that the active participation of the masses in the foundation of any political process is essential to the revolutionary process. This idea leads to an understanding of Rosa Luxemburg's political advocations such as the acquisition of popular autonomy. It is also the center of her ideas about a model of democratic socialism, pervading her entire work and exerting its effect on the current political dynamics of many movements and sectors of the contemporary left. (shrink)

This article examines the role of the recent movement of "popular philosophy" collections such as Philosophy and the Simpsons, Philosophy and Game of Thrones within the larger goals of philosophy as a discipline.

The popular culture and philosophy (PCP) book publishing movement has always been about serving the public. The idea for Seinfeld and Philosophy was to explain a broad range of philosophy and philosophers in a way that anyone could understand because the examples came from a popular television show. Plenty of professors were referencing Seinfeld in the classroom to help students connect with big ideas. Seinfeld and Philosophy would spur some readers to pick up Plato or enroll in (...) a philosophy course. By applying philosophy to pop culture, authors deliver a truly novel philosophical insight into the artwork. There has never been complete uniformity in the genre of PCP, but for the most part motivations have been pedagogical. The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series have a website with a blog that is open to submissions. The value of public philosophy in general, and PCP in particular, remains an open question at many institutions. (shrink)

In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or (...) living power enables his philosophical account of both the intelligibility of objects and of what it means to die. This explains his characterization of the Wissenschaftslehre as a system in which ‘all is act, movement, and life’. In Sect. 1, I explain the context of Jacobi’s use of ‘caput mortuum’ as a term for the thing in itself. In Sects. 2 and 3, I reconstruct two immortalist arguments from Fichte’s Jena period. The first is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes ‘death’s head’. The second is that, insofar as the I charges us with the moral perfection of nature, it is the final cause of our entire life, including its end. This is to say that the I puts our every moment into question, even our last. In Sect. 4, I use these immortalist arguments to interpret the striking claim from the Vocation. (shrink)

Much is being made of local food. It is at once a social movement, a diet, and an economic strategy—a popular solution—to a global food system in great distress. Yet, despite its popularity or perhaps because of it, local food (especially in the US) is also something of a chimera if not a tool of the status quo. This paper reflects on and contrasts aspects of current local food rhetoric with Dalhberg’s notion of a regenerative food system. It (...) identifies three problematic emphases—the locavore emphasis, the Wal-Mart emphasis, and the Pollan emphasis—and argues that they are shifting local food (as a concept and a social movement) away from the deeper concerns of equity, citizenship, place-building, and sustainability. It is suggested that local food activists and advocates might consider the use of multiple methodologies and forms of expression to explore the integration and reintegration of local food into diverse and redundant place-based practice. A short case study of a low-income, urban neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan, illustrates the value of contextual analysis for more fully enabling the local food movement and a regenerative food system. (shrink)

The hypothesis that terrorism often emerges when mass collective action declines and radicals take up arms to compensate for the weakness of a mass movement has been around for some time; however, it has never been tested systematically. In this article the authors investigate the relationship between terrorist violence and mass protest in the context of the Spanish transition to democracy. This period is known for its pacts and negotiations between political elites, but in fact, it was accompanied by (...) high levels of terrorist violence and popular mobilization. To test the hypothesis, the authors have created two data sets, one on victims of terrorism and another on participation in demonstrations. The data clearly confirm that terrorism erupted in Spain when participation in demonstrations started to decline. This result sheds new light on the nonstructural conditions associated with the onset of terrorist violence. (shrink)

Thinking in Āsana is an exploration of three popular lineages of modern postural yoga - Viniyoga, Iyengar Yoga, and Ashtanga Yoga.

The New Beginning Movement (NBM) (1971–1978) in Trinidad functioned as a voice of direct democracy and workers self-management through popular assemblies, and as a global coordinating council of a Pan-Caribbean International with linkages across the region, in Britain, the United States, and Canada. A crucial philosophical and strategic leaven in the 1970 Black Power Revolt led by Geddes Granger’s and Dave Darbeau’s National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and the 1975 United Labour Front (ULF) in Trinidad, NBM aspired to (...) interpret Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians equally, and on their own autonomous terms, toward self-directed emancipation. Led by Bukka Rennie, Wally Look Lai, and Franklyn Harvey, NBM was inspired by C.L.R. James’s intellectual legacies. Through publications such as New Beginning, Caribbean Dialogue, and The Vanguard, these partisans advocated labor’s self-emancipation and critical perspectives on capitalism and state power, and exposed the limits of elite party politics and representative government. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focussing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorised power. The focus on power as potentia generates a new conception of popular power. Radical democrats–whether drawing on Hobbes's 'sleeping sovereign' or on Spinoza's 'multitude'–understand popular power as something that transcends ordinary institutional politics, as for instance popular plebsites or mass movements. However, the book (...) argues that these understandings reflect a residual scholasticism which Hobbes and Spinoza ultimately repudiate. Instead, on the book's revisionist conception, a political phenomenon should be said to express popular power when it is both popular (it eliminates oligarchy and encompasses the whole polity), and also powerful (it robustly determines political and social outcomes). Two possible institutional forms that this popular power might take are distinguished: Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism, or Spinozist civic strengthening. But despite divergent institutional proposals, the book argues that both Hobbes and Spinoza share the conviction that there is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence. From this point of view, the book accuses radical democrats of pernicious romanticism; the slow, meticulous work of organizational design and maintenance is the true centre of popular power. Three minute video summary available via HPBin3. Extended discussion on The Political Theory Review podcast. First chapter open access available via Oxford Scholarship Online. Videos of book talks at National University of Singapore (Centre for Legal Theory) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani) available via YouTube. (See links below.). (shrink)

Introduction: -/- Walking, illegally, down main Montreal thoroughfares with students in nightly demonstrations, with neighbors whom I barely knew before, banging pots and pans, and with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people on every 22nd of the month since March—this was unimaginable a year ago.1 Unimaginable that the collective and heterogeneous body, which is the “manif [demonstration]”, could feel so much like home, despite its internal differences. Unimaginable that this mutual dependence on one another could enable not only (...) collective protection from traffic and police but the affective strength and audacity to take back the street—a mutual dependence that includes the masked demonstrators ready to help when gassed by police. Unimaginable too that we would be breaking the law daily,2 that blocking traffic and seeing the city from the center of the street would become habit, and that as the “printemps érable” becomes summer, we would be investing our time in neighborhood assemblies, in weaving social bonds, and in sustaining and deepening the mobilization. -/- I say these actions were unimaginable not merely because the context that motivated the enlargement of the student movement into a popular struggle combines a number of unique features. Nor were they simply unimaginable because the Quebec I previously knew was marred by the Islamophobia and cultural racism made visible during the reasonable accommodation debates, a society whose mapping excluded me and for whose sake it would have been difficult to protest.3 Rather, I say these actions were unimaginable because the possibility of this popular and inclusive mobilization had not yet been created. It is this possibility that the Quebec student movement has created, I argue, not only in quantitative terms by engaging so many, but at the level of lived subjectivities and intercorporeal solidarity. The evolution of the movement should be understood, then, both as a swelling of its popular base and as an intensification and qualitative transformation of ways of life. (shrink)

The notion of ‘rhetorical bodies’ argues the cause of the rhetorical elements in the material and the material elements in the rhetorical in ways that can be seen as analogous to the bi-partite modes of Deleuzian film philosophy, ‘movement-image’ and ‘time-image’. Tamil films of the 1940s and 1950s bear the strong imprints of the rhetorical elements of the Self-Respect Movement and Dravidian Movement, which took root in different versions during the 1920s–60s. The narrative locations of the bodies (...) in the Tamil films of the 1940s and 1950s provide interesting theoretical and analytical challenges if one seeks to combine the Deleuzian notions of ‘movement-image’ with the notions of material rhetorics. The coming together of these notions provides new pointers to the understanding of an important phase in the history of Tamil cinema for its implications on the long-running nexus between politics and films in the state of Tamil Nadu. The Deleuzian trajectory in film philosophy provides more than enough pointers to examine early Tamil cinema's attempts to construct ‘movement-images’ through rhetorical bodies. This paper seeks to examine the contexts of ‘movement-images’ and the role of ‘rhetorical bodies’ in constructing the same in Velaikari, scripted by C. N. Annadurai. Popularly known as Aringnar Anna, C. N. Annadurai was the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and the Founder of DMK, the party which unseated Congress from power in Tamil Nadu in 1967, and the state remains out of reach of the national parties ever since. (shrink)

Popular Indian cinema provides a test case for examining the limitations of Gilles Deleuze's categories of movement-image and time-image. Due to the context-specific aesthetic and cultural traditions that inform popular Indian cinema, although it appears at times to be both movement- and time-image, it actually creates a different type of image. Analysis of Toofani Tarzan (1936) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) demonstrates how, alternating between a movement of world typical of the time-image, and a (...) sensory-motor movement of character typical of the movement-image, popular Indian cinema explores the potential fluxing of identities that emerge during moments of historical complexity. (shrink)

Some have referred to relatively recent forms of popular Buddhism as an ‘engaged’ Buddhism that has revived or redirected traditional Buddhist ideas and practices found in meditation texts to reflect a greater social or worldly emphasis than suggested in earlier historical moments. One of these ideas is the quadripartite framework of the ‘immeasurable states’ (aprameya/appameya) or ‘divine abidings’ (brahmavihāra), the most prominent of which in popular Buddhism is mettā (friendliness/loving-kindness). This article traces the philosophy of the ‘immeasurable states’ (...) found in meditation texts from various Indic traditions (Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu) and then presents the ways in which these traditional ideas (especially mettā) have informed popular Buddhist movements in the twentieth century. Points of discussion include: ‘engaged’ Buddhism's relationship with traditional Buddhist ethics; arguments concerning the coalescence of monastic-centred meditation practices with popular Buddhist notions of social service; and the distinct utilization of mettā in contemporary Buddhist societies in contrast to the mobilizing impulses of comparable religious communities (Hindu and Jain) with a similar heritage of mettā discourse in South Asia. (shrink)

The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered (...) in a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests. (shrink)

Although Karl Polanyi is best known for his theorization of market regulation and the double movement, democratizing the economic was one of his core concerns. He believed societies need to bring labor, land, and money under collective oversight to displace the logic of market fundamentalism with the logic of human needs. In this article, the author draws on Polanyi’s vocabulary to shed light on the denial of money politics and the possibility of democratization. The author illustrates these dynamics through (...) an analysis of long-term dynamics of (de)politicization in British colonial America and the United States through the 1930s. The author developed this approach hoping that it can contribute to nudging public debates beyond regulation and monetary policy techniques and toward popular involvement and knowledge. (shrink)

Los movimientos sociales (MS) son acciones colectivas reiteradas, de confrontación o desborde de las instituciones, con expresiones más o menos organizadas en torno a una reivindicación. Acciones sostenidas de reclamos y demandas, que no se identifican con las instituciones que los generan. La comunicación desde la perspectiva del sujeto se convierte en vehículo de las demandas. La comunicación popular fortalece la acción colectiva interna, mientras que, por otro lado, los medios masivos desarticulan la imagen de los sujetos enfatizando sus (...) intereses al servicio de empresas, corporaciones y conglomerados. Algunas experiencias en el medio rural uruguayo, nos permiten reflexionar: ¿Es posible que los MS sean espacios educativos y constituyan sujetos pedagógicos? ¿Qué función cumple la comunicación popular al interior y al exterior de los MS? ¿Cómo abordar a los medios masivos que banalizan y distorsionan la lucha de los MS? El estudio de los MS ¿es una tarea académica o militante? (shrink)

An examination of oracles in popular forms of Cuban espiritismo invites a rethinking of the role of “randomness” and “context” in the anthropology of divination. Through an analysis of the ways by which spirit mediums develop as persons, and their implications for the mechanics of divination, I argue that among espiritistas the meaning of particular configurations cannot be separated from the event that brings them about. Relatively simple in their properties (e.g. water), spiritist oracles function to provide impulse to (...) a perceived metaphysical universe that requires the generation of movement in order to achieve instantiation. The argument is that this movement provides a background of chaos essential to the purpose of divination. To demonstrate this, I forward an analogy to the language of electronic voice phenomena in parapsychology, in particular with its concept of “noise.” In both EVP and espiritismo, “noise” is the substance that allows spirits to communicate. (shrink)

In October 1940, the government of the Shaanxi-Ganjiang-Ningxia Border Region used Yan’an County as the center for trying out the Latinxua Sin Wenz Movement for winter schools. It went through three stages: experimentation, promotion, and reformation. Faced with insurmountable difficulties, the Education Department quietly terminated the project in 1943. The foremost reason why the Communist Party promoted this project was to remove the obstacle posed by Chinese characters for eliminating illiteracy. Despite problems such as ignorance of the officials, uncultured (...) teachers, resistance from intellectuals, subjective and unrealistic beliefs, the Latinxua Sin Wenz Movement in border regions of China could not be ignored since it brought out the tension between popular culture and nationalism. (shrink)

: In October 1940, the government of the Shaanxi-Ganjiang-Ningxia Border Region used Yan’an County as the center for trying out the Latinxua Sin Wenz Movement for winter schools. It went through three stages: experimentation, promotion, and reformation. Faced with insurmountable difficulties, the Education Department quietly terminated the project in 1943. The foremost reason why the Communist Party promoted this project was to remove the obstacle posed by Chinese characters for eliminating illiteracy. Despite problems such as ignorance of the officials, (...) uncultured teachers, resistance from intellectuals, subjective and unrealistic beliefs, the Latinxua Sin Wenz Movement in border regions of China could not be ignored since it brought out the tension between popular culture and nationalism. (shrink)