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The book presents Daniel Berrigan’s contributions and challenge to Catholic social thought. His contribution lies in his consistent, comprehensive, theoretical, and practical approach to issues of peace and justice over the last fifty years. His challenge lies in his criticism of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism, inviting Catholic activists and thinkers to undertake not just a reformist but a radical critique and alternative to these realities. The aim of this book is, for the first time, to make Berrigan’s thought and life available to the Catholic academic community, so that a fruitful interaction takes place. How does his work enlighten and challenge such a community? How can this community enrich and criticize his work? To these ends, the editors have recruited thinkers, scholars, thinker-activists already familiar with and sympathetic with Berrigan’s work and those who are less so identified. The result is a rich, receptive, and critical treatment of the meaning nd impact of his work. What kind of challenge does he present to academic business-as-usual in Catholic universities? How can the life and work of individual Catholic academics be transformed if such persons took Berrigan’s work seriously, theoretically and practically? Do Catholic universities need Berrigan’s vision to fulfill more integrally and completely their own mission? Does the self-knowing subject and theorist need to become a radical subject and theorist? In light of the world’s current social, political, economic, and environmental crises, doesn’t Berrigan’s call for a pacific and prophetic community of justice rooted in the Good News of the Gospel make compelling sense?

Media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict does not necessarily enhance one’s knowledge or understanding of the Palestinians; on the contrary, they are often reduced to either victims or perpetrators. Similarly, while many academic studies devote considerable effort to analyzing the political situation in the occupied territories, there have been few sophisticated case studies of Palestinian refugees living under Israeli rule. An ethnographic study of Palestinian refugees in Dheisheh refugee camp, Occupied Lives looks closely at the attempts of the camp inhabitants to survive and bounce back from the profound effects of political violence and Israeli military occupation. Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork conducted inside the camp, this study examines the daily efforts of camp inhabitants to secure survival and meaning during the period of the al-Aqsa Intifada. It argues that the political developments and experiences of extensive violence at the time, which left most refugees outside of direct activism, caused many camp inhabitants to disengage from traditional forms of politics. Instead, they became involved in alternative practices aimed at maintaining their sense of social worth and integrity by focusing on processes to establish a ‘normal’ order, social continuity, and morality. Coming from Social Anthropology, Nina Gren explores these processes and the ambiguities and dilemmas that necessarily arose from them and the ways in which the political and the existential are often intertwined in Dheisheh.

This Woman’s Work: The Writing and Activism of Bebe Moore Campbell is a social history and critical biography based on the life of award-winning writer Bebe Moore Campbell. This manuscript examines Bebe Moore Campbell’s life and activism in two periods: first, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s Black Student Movement; and second, as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. Primarily known as a bestselling novelist, Campbell’s first and final novels, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992) and 72 Hour Hold (2005) reveal a direct relationship to her lesser-known activist work. As a writer and activist, Bebe Moore Campbell used frame shifting within each of her works. Her writing thus becomes a powerful vehicle through which subject matter is enlivened and expanded, immersing her readers in relevant historical and sociopolitical phenomena. As a novelist, Bebe Moore Campbell utilized recurring signature themes within each novel to theorize and to connect popular audiences with African American historical memory and current sociopolitical issues. Similarly, Campbell’s bridge leadership, charismatic personality, and writing merge within two social movement organizations as she aids in significant grassroots/local and institutional change.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.

A historical study of black gay activism and identities from the 1950s to the present based on research in printed and archival sources. It examines both the construction of racism and homophobia and the gradual mobilization by black gay men against oppression. To do so it surveys shifting representations in magazines, newspapers, film, pornography, and analyses the ways in which black gay men succumbed to and resisted negative stereotypes. In the era of civil rights, James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin spoke out for social justice, as well as critiqued some tenets of the new black power ideology. But the stigma surrounding black gay identities undermined their place in the movement. In the 1950s, black periodicals ran frank discussions of black homosexuality—often associated with deviance and crime--but this trend slowed by the 1960s, giving way to respectable images. But in 1967 a white filmmaker directed a film about the life of a black gay hustler, while the increase in gay pulp fiction presented yet another image of black gayness. After Stonewall, black gay activists organized for sexual liberation, gay rights, and religious freedom in their own right. Some joined coalitions between black and gay liberation, while others created black queer identities. Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald, a member of a Catholic order, worked to bridge black and gay liberation, while seeking full inclusion in the church. By the 1980s, a new generation settled in predominantly white gay communities, and sought recognition through writing, performing, and speaking out. Joseph Beam organized readings at the local gay bookstore, wrote for the local press, and edited the first black gay anthology. The Howard University professor, James Tinney, struggled against black homophobia but also founded the first black gay and lesbian church. By the 1980s, the AIDS crisis disproportionately hit black gay men, but new organizations, such as Black and White Men Together also formed to combat prejudice and overcome social isolation. By the 2000s, social media, legal change, and further acceptance created a veritable revolution in gay black history, even as racism and homophobia continued to impact the lives of black men who have sex with men.

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies, and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir explores a black female dancer’s personal journey over four decades across three continents and numerous countries. The author situates herself in the 1960s Black Arts Movement in the S.F. Bay Area, the dynamics of being a black woman dancing in Europe in the late 1960s, and dancing professionally in New York City in the early 1970s, while participating in racial inroads into important arts venues like Lincoln Center. She recounts friendships and collaborations with major artistic figures like Katherine Dunham, Ntozake Shange, Rod Rodgers, Diane McIntyre, Donald McKayle, Dr. Kwabena Nketia, and many others. She explores dancing in Ghana for almost a year, the inspiration for her return to the Oakland Bay Area in the late 1970s to help create the city’s black dance scene while being an adjunct dance lecturer at Stanford University. She also considers how her arts activism helped to engender more cultural equity in the arts nationally. She remembers the 1980s national multicultural arts movement and regional community dance activism, including her own national dance initiative, Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. Finally, she ponders her self-reinvention in her 50s into a noted black studies and hip-hop scholar in academia.

Pollution is one of the most pressing issues facing contemporary China and among the most prominent causes for unrest. Much of industry and mining takes place in rural areas, yet we know little about how rural communities affected by severe pollution make sense of it and the diverse form of activism they embrace. This book describes some of these engagements with pollution through three in-depth case studies based on the author’s fieldwork and an analysis of “cancer villages” examined in existing social science accounts. It challenges assumptions that villagers are ignorant about pollution or fully complicit with it and it looks beyond high-profile cases and beyond single strategies. It examines how villagers’ concerns and practices evolve over time and how pollution may become normalised. Through the concept of “resigned activism”, it advocates rethinking conventional approaches to activism to encompass less visible forms of engagement. It offers insights into the complex dynamics of popular contention, environmental movements and their situatedness within local and national political economies. Describing a likely widespread scenario across much of industrialised rural China, this book provides a window onto the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits. It portrays rural environmentalism and its limitations as prisms through which to study key issues surrounding contemporary Chinese culture and society, such as state responsibility, social justice, ambivalence towards development and modernisation and some of the new fault lines of inequality and social conflict which they generate.

When natural gas drilling moves into an urban or a suburban neighborhood, a two-hundred-foot-high drill appears on the other side of a back yard fence and diesel trucks clog a quiet two-lane residential street. Children seem to be having more than the usual number of nosebleeds. There are so many local cases of cancer that the elementary school starts a cancer support group. In this book, Jessica Smartt Gullion examines what happens when natural gas extraction by means of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” takes place not on wide-open rural land but in a densely populated area with homes, schools, hospitals, parks, and businesses. Gullion focuses on fracking in the Barnett Shale, the natural-gas–rich geological formation under the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. She gives voice to the residents—for the most part educated, middle class, and politically conservative—who became reluctant anti-drilling activists in response to perceived environmental and health threats posed by fracking. Gullion offers an overview of oil and gas development and describes the fossil-fuel culture of Texas, the process of fracking, related health concerns, and regulatory issues (including the notorious “Halliburton loophole”). She chronicles the experiences of community activists as they fight to be heard and to get the facts about the safety of fracking. Touted as a greener alternative and a means to reduce dependence on foreign oil, natural gas development is an important part of American energy policy. Yet, as this book shows, it comes at a cost to the local communities who bear the health and environmental burdens.

In 1980–1, anti-police collective violence spread across England. This was the earliest confrontation between the state and members of the British public during Thatcher’s divisive government. This powerful and original book locates these disturbances within a longer struggle against racism and disadvantage faced by black Britons, which had seen a growth in more militant forms of resistance since World War II. In this first full-length historical study of 1980–1, three case studies – of Bristol, Brixton, and Manchester – emphasise the importance of local factors and the wider situation, concluding that these events should be viewed as ‘collective bargaining by riot’ – as a tool attempting increased political inclusion for marginalised black Britons. Focussing on the political activities of black Britons themselves, it explores the actions of community organisations in the aftermath of disorders to highlight dichotomous valuations of state mechanisms. A key focus is public inquiries, which were contrastingly viewed by black Britons as either a governmental diversionary tactic, or a method of legitimising their inclusion with the British constitutional system. Through study of a wide range of newly-available archives, interviews, understudied local sources, and records of grassroots black political organisations, this work expands understandings of protest movements and community activism in modern democracies while highlighting the often-problematic reliance upon ‘official’ sources when forming historical narratives. Of interest to researchers of race, ethnicity, and migration history, as well as modern British political and social history more generally, its interdisciplinary nature will also appeal to wider fields, including sociology, political sciences, and criminology.

A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical engagement with theliberal problematic—the disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession, between freedom and subjection in the American nation-state—remain incomplete. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival repositions a spectrum of discourses, from canonical nineteenth-century American literary studies to black women’s history, to interrogate black women’s disruptions of the liberal problematic as a medium of resistance. It deploys African-Americanist and feminist literary criticism by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Lindon Barrett, post-1960s histories of enslavement and black political consciousness by Stephanie M. H. Camp, and rhetorical theories developed by Shirley Wilson Logan and Vorris Nunley, to expand the bounds of contemporary critical inquiry in two key ways. First, Resistance Reimagined spotlights nineteenth-century black women’s intervention into the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance. This unsettles sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular, while problematizing how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women’s activism—against Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for instance—as inauthentic or accommodationist. Second, the text juxtaposes early writers and thinkers, including Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper, with authors of modern neo-slave narrative, including Sherley Anne Williams, to grapple more effectively with the neoliberal present.

Car workers’ union activism has long held a strong grip on popular memories of the post-war period. Working in the quintessential industry of modernity their labour militancy has been linked to narratives of economic decline and of rising working-class living standards. Yet despite their centrality to understanding of this period, car workers’ capacity for collective action has often been taken for granted, with mobilisation attributed to uncomplicated economic motivations or the last gasps of a declining “traditional class consciousness”, and the effects of the post-war settlement. This book looks at the changing forms of agency and subjectivity expressed by labour militancy, considering workplace activism in the motor industry as a specific historical creation of post-war Britain, rather than a reflection of “tradition”. It traces the origins of shop-floor organisations which first emerged in the 1950s, studying the processes by which workers built their union cultures, and exploring the capacity of car workers to generate new solidarities and collective values in this period. Focus then turns to the 1960s and 1970s and the social practices and cultural norms that resulted from this cultural assembling, looking to understand how worker activism shaped the agency of car workers in post-war Britain, influencing the forms that strike action took. Through a mixture of oral history interviews, letters, meeting minutes and periodicals, this book analyses the meanings workers attributed to industrial conflict, asking whether factory activism generated attitudes distinct from the dominant values of wider British society.

Health figures centrally in late twentieth-century environmental activism. There are many competing claims about the health of ecosystems, the health of the planet, and the health of humans, yet there is little agreement among the likes of D.C. lobbyists, grassroots organizers, eco-anarchist collectives, and science-based advocacy organizations about whose health matters most, or what health even means. In this book, Jennifer Thomson untangles the complex web of political, social, and intellectual developments that gave rise to the multiplicity of claims and concerns about environmental health. Thomson traces four strands of activism from the 1970s to the present: the environmental lobby, environmental justice groups, radical environmentalism and bioregionalism, and climate justice activism. By focusing on health, environmentalists were empowered to intervene in the rise of neoliberalism, the erosion of the regulatory state, and the decimation of mass-based progressive politics. Yet, as this book reveals, an individualist definition of health ultimately won out over more communal understandings. Considering this turn from collective solidarity toward individual health helps explain the near paralysis of collective action in the face of planetary disaster.

What does China’s rise mean for transnational civil society? What happens when global activist networks engage a powerful and norm-resistant new hegemon? This book combines detailed ethnographic research with cross-case comparisons to identify key factors underpinning variation in the results and processes of advocacy on a range of issues affecting both China and the world, including global warming, intellectual property rights, HIV/AIDS treatment, the use of capital punishment, suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement, and Tibetan independence. Built on an innovative blend of comparative and international theory, it advances a theory of “advocacy drift”—a process whereby the objectives and principled beliefs of activists are transformed through interaction with the Chinese state. The book is a timely reassessment of transnational civil society in the era of an ascendant China, and is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of civil society organizations.

This book provides the first detailed account of the work of the Actresses' Franchise League, taking the story of the organisation further than ever before. Formulated as a historiographically innovative critical biography of the League over the fifty years of the organisation’s activities, this book invites a total reassessment of the League within both 20^th Century industry networks and accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in the UK. Making a genuine contribution to both theatre and suffrage histories, this book looks in detail at the performative propaganda of the suffrage movement and the role of feminist actresses as activists during and after the campaign for Votes for Women. It explores the extensive networks of political and theatrical activism and social campaigning through which suffragist performers, playwrights and producers shaped their careers, and reveals how determined the Actresses' Franchise League was to be visible in public space, and to create equal opportunities for women in the theatre industry. Drawing on archival material, this book shows how members and allies of the League addressed a broad range of political and social issues through their work, how they presented and represented women and womanhood, and how the organisation, formed and embedded in the Edwardian period, diversified during and after the First and Second World Wars.

In 1968 a series of local, national and global upheavals coalesced to produce some of the most consequential protest movements in the history of the United States. By examining the impact of 1968 on the shape of American politics, culture and identity, this volume offers a major fiftieth-year anniversary retrospective of this watershed year for activism and radical politics. Reframing 1968 brings together thirteen new interdisciplinary essays by leading historians that focus on questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, war, democracy, urban demonstrations, campus radicalism, and the culture of protest. There is also a strong emphasis in the book on the relationship between late 1960s protest and contemporary protest movements, especially Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Each of the chapters have a concluding section in which authors reflect on the consequences and legacy of their particular topic set against more recent perspectives on 1968.

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in fron of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Agency and Documentary Strategies focuses on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity.

Spanning a period which stretches from the 19th century to the present day, this book takes a novel look at the British labour movement by examining the interaction between trade unions, the Labour Party, other parties of the Left, and other groups such as the Co-op movement and the wider working class, to highlight the dialectic nature of these relationships, marked by consensus and dissention. It shows that, although perceived as a source of weakness, those inner conflicts have also been a source of creative tension, at times generating significant breakthroughs. This book seeks to renew and expand the field of British labour studies, setting out new avenues for research so as to widen the audience and academic interest in the field, in a context which makes the revisiting of past struggles and dilemmas more pressing than ever. The book together brings well-established labour historians and political scientists, thus establishing dialogue across disciplines, and younger colleagues who are contributing to the renewal of the field. It provides a range of case studies as well as more wide-ranging assessments of recent trends in labour organising, and will therefore be of interest to academics and students of history and politics, as well as to practitioners, in the British Isles and beyond.