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Employers have enjoyed a tremendous amount of power throughout American history. This nine-chapter collection examines that power as it relates to the so-called “labor question” or “labor problem,” defined in the late nineteenth century by academics, clergymen, journalists, lawyers, politicians and employers to describe strikes, boycott campaigns, and union organization campaigns. Employers asserted their power in numerous ways; they organized with one another, busted unions, broke strikes, and blacklisted labor activists. They enjoyed largely favorable political climates; judges regularly granted them injunctions against protesting workers, politicians passed laws making union organizing difficult, and armed forces—police forces and National Guardsman--assisted them during strikes and boycott campaigns staged by workers. These chapters examine class conflicts on the local and national levels, demonstrating how employers contested labor in many different contexts—and usually won. The chapters explore how employers used race to divide the working class, how they sought to deflect attention away from their own privileged class positions, how they used the law to their advantages, and how they settled internal disagreements. Taken together, the chapters reveal a rich history of employer organizing, lobbying politicians, and creating new forms of public relations while enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary people.

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence is a history of grassroots activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s. Across the country, in and outside of prisons, radical women participated in collective actions that insisted on the interconnections between interpersonal violence against women and the racial and gender violence of policing and imprisonment. These organizing efforts generated an anticarceral feminist politics that was defined by a critique of state violence; an understanding of race, gender, class, and sexuality as mutually constructed systems of power and meaning; and a practice of coalition-based organizing. Drawing on an array of archival sources as well as first-person narratives, the book traces the political activities, ideas, and influence of this activist current. All Our Trials demonstrates how it shaped broader debates about the root causes of and remedies for violence against women as well as played a decisive role in the making of a prison abolition movement.

There are two major women’s movements in Morocco: the Islamists who hold sharia as the platform for building a culture of women’s rights, and the feminists who use the United Nations’ framework to amend sharia law. This book shows how the interactions of these movements over the past two decades have transformed the debates, the organization, and the strategies of each other. This book looks at three key movement moments: the 1992 feminist One Million Signature Campaign, the 2000 Islamist mass rally opposing the reform of family law, and the 2003 Casablanca attacks by a group of Islamist radicals. At the core of these moments are disputes over legitimacy, national identity, gender representations, and political negotiations for shaping state gender policies. Located at the intersection of feminism and Islam, these conflicts have led to the Islamization of feminists on the one hand and the feminization of Islamists on the other. Documenting the synergistic relationship between these movements, this text reveals how the boundaries of feminism and Islamism have been radically reconfigured. It offers a conceptual framework for studying social movements, one that allows us to understand how Islamic feminism is influencing global debates on human rights.

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. This book recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, the book argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.

This book explores the question of how contemporary collectives are creating diverse, new forms of creative economies that arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, technologies and others around economic concerns. Like older forms of left association, these collectives seek to bring about change. They do so, however, not by working to overthrow and replace an underlying capitalist ‘system’ with an equally totalising alternative like socialism, but by experimenting with and inventing diverse new forms of economic life in the present. This book examines how economic concerns are formed and the techniques through which concerned groups are gathered and come to create alternative economies. In doing so it maps out a geography of collective action. It takes actor network theories of action as a starting point for thinking about how collective action brings the new into being, and argues that contemporary collectives are best theorised as hybrid collectives. This approach enables an understanding of how collectives initiate change and provides a view to the diverse forces through which they do so, including through the generation of non-discursive bodily experiences such as affects and emotions. In particular, this book argues that the relational and geographical nature of performative action is central to understanding the way in which hybrid collectives create alternative economies.

This book is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, Building the Black Arts Movement provides a fresh take on the general trajectory of African American literary (and cultural) studies as the field developed over the course of two explosive decades in the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that the Black Arts movement can be understood as a pivotal and volatile moment in the long history of America’s culture wars. Moreover, by shifting our focus from creative artists and repositioning Fuller at the center of the movement--as one of its most underappreciated architects--the book grants new insights into the critical role of editorial work, the international dimensions of the movement, the complexities of sexuality, and the challenges of Black institution building during the 1960s and ’70s.

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. This book brings together a collection of essays that explore long-standing themes in labor history and working-class studies as well as contemporary struggles over the relationship between engagement, teaching, and scholarship. The book examines the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. The chapters discuss how scholars' participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. The chapters also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. The book supports the argument that scholar activism and engaged teaching are and should be pursued. It demonstrates the many ways that scholars and teachers can be effective advocates when acting outside traditional definitions of their academic work.

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia, this book critically examines the fierce conflicts over this violent and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining. Focusing on the grassroots activist organization Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), the book reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions and the emergence of community-based activist organizations. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, the book tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.

Comedy & Critique is a sociological inquiry which seeks to engage with the art-world of the stand-up comedian as well as providing an interpretation of comedic works. It demonstrates a correspondence between what is happening within stand-up comedy and what is going on in the society from which the comic material arises. The book demonstrates that stand-up comedians are engaged in a proto-sociological enterprise, a method of ‘doing’ sociology. Comedian’s material may be viewed as a comedic acting out of forms of sociological knowledge, an act which is self-driven and intra-personal. Stand-up comedians came to their proto-sociology as stand-up in Britain moved from the fringes of entertainment in working man’s clubs to Fringe theatre. Through this transition stand-up became a space where a ‘New Left’ politics of anti-racism, feminism and a queering of self and society was both lived and artfully positioned. By exploring the ‘art of stand-up’, as a modernist art-form and professionalised industry, the book argues that stand-up is the art of building and improvising social relations.

Americans come together to fight diseases. For over 100 years, they have asked their neighbors to contribute to disease campaigns and supported health policies that target one disease at a time. Common Enemies asks why disease campaigns are the battles Americans can agree to fight, why some diseases attract more attention than others, and how fighting one disease at a time changes how Americans distribute charitable dollars, prioritize policies, and promote health. Drawing on the first comprehensive data on thousands of organizations targeting hundreds of diseases over decades, the author shows that disease campaigns proliferate due to the perception of health as a universal goal, the appeal of narrowly targeted campaigns, and the strategic avoidance of controversy. They funnel vast sums of money and attention to a few favored diseases, and they prioritize awareness campaigns and medical research over preventing disease and ensuring access to healthcare. It’s easy to imagine more efficient ways to promote collective well-being. Yet the same forces that limit the potential of individual disease campaigns to improve health also stimulate the vast outpouring of money and attention. Rather than displacing attention to other problems, disease campaigns build up the capacity to address them.

In the popular imagination, Caribbean islands represent tropical paradise. This image underlies the efforts of many environmentalists to protect Caribbean coral reefs, mangroves, and rainforests. Much less attention is given to environmental conditions in urban areas, where the islands’ poorer citizens suffer from exposure to garbage, untreated sewage, and air pollution. Concrete Jungles explores why these issues tend to be ignored, demonstrating how mainstream environmentalism reflects and reproduces class and race inequalities. Based on over a decade of research in Kingston, Jamaica, and Willemstad, Curaçao, the book contrasts the “Uptown environmentalism” of largely middle-class professionals with the “Downtown environmentalism” of inner-city residents. It combines an original and sophisticated theoretical discussion of the politics of difference with rich ethnographic detail, including vivid depictions of Caribbean “ghettos” and elite enclaves. The book presents a novel approach to environmental injustice, combining a political economy perspective with attention to the cultural politics that naturalize socio-ecological inequalities. One of the first works to extend environmental anthropological theory to explicitly include the study of cities, the book shows how divergent forms of environmentalism articulate class, race, and urban space. Forms of environmentalism that implicitly or explicitly understand cities as opposed to nature, and poor people as a threat to environmental purity, contribute to “urban naturalisms” that naturalize social hierarchies and the unequal distribution of environmental problems.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they endeavor to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world. This book examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past 100 years. The book asks how visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action. The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to this text, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. The book presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

At the end of World War II, the federal government announced plans to terminate its public child care programs that had been established during the war for working mothers. In response, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these programs rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, this book traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the structural forces impeding government support for broadly distributed child care as well as the possibilities for partnership and the limitations among key parties such as feminists, Communists, labor activists, working-class mothers, and early childhood educators, the book helps to explain the barriers to a publicly funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.

Framed in debates about the crisis of democracy, the book analyzes one of the most influential social movements of recent times: Spain’s “Indignados” or “15-M” movement. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world. Based on access to key participants in the 15-M movement and Podemos, and extensive participant observation, the book tells the story of this remarkable movement, its emergence, evolution, and impact. In so doing, it challenges some of the core arguments in social movement scholarship about the factors likely to lead to movement success. Instead, the book argues that movements organized around autonomous network logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal organizations, strong professionalized leadership, and the ability to attract external resources. The key to understanding its power lies in the shared political culture and collective identity that emerged following the occupation of Spain’s central squares. These protest camps sustained the movement by forging reciprocal ties of solidarity between diverse actors, and generating a shared set of critical master frames across a diverse set of actors and issues (e.g., housing, education, pensions, privatization of public services, corruption) that enabled the movement to effectively contest hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and democracy, influencing public debate and the political agenda.

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands—the Salem fire of 1914 and the Halifax explosion of 1917—saw working-class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. This book draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions—both formal and informal—that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. It explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as the book shows, these methods—though often quick and effective—remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive “solutions” on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

It is conventional wisdom that because of lucrative contracts negotiated by the United Auto Workers (UAW) under Walter Reuther's leadership, most autoworkers in the U.S. enjoyed steady work, increasing wages, and improved benefits in the postwar boom following World War II. In short, autoworkers entered the middle class. In contrast, this book argues that for Detroit autoworkers there was no postwar boom. Instead, the years from 1945 to 1960 were dominated by job instability and economic insecurity. This argument is based largely on oral history interviews and research in local newspapers, which covered the auto industry extensively. Conditions were worse for African Americans and white women, but almost all autoworkers experienced precarious, often dire circumstances. Recessions, automation, decentralization, and the collapse of independent automakers in Detroit are part of the story, but materials shortages, steel, coal, and copper strikes, parts supplier strikes, wildcat strikes, overproduction (especially in 1955), hot weather, cold weather, plant explosions, age, race, and gender workplace discrimination, and the inability of autoworkers to afford new cars contributed to instability and insecurity. Hardly anyone in the 1950s—whether ordinary autoworkers, union leaders, auto company executives, business analysts, or local shopkeepers—thought that the decade was marked by steady work, improving wages, or anything resembling predictable income for autoworkers.