815 research outputs found

    Trajectories of Change, from Armed Struggle to Politics: The Transformation of Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) from a Liberation Movement into a Political Party

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    The end of the Cold War catalysed a range of civil wars and separatist conflicts that battled for government control around the globe. Most of them were resolved through peace agreements which led rebels to lay down their arms and adopt political strategies to pursue their goals. A primary challenge for any resistance or liberation movement is how to win legitimacy and support from the population. This thesis is a case study on the transformation of the Sudan People Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) from a liberation movement to a political party and, later, government. It provides a context-specific understanding and analysis of how the liberation movement garnered legitimacy by tapping into local and international support in the liberation war. The analysis uses legitimacy as the optic for exploring the historical narrative and process-tracing to unearth multifaceted and interactive mechanisms, and strategies facilitating the liberation movement’s quest to consolidate domestic and international legitimacy during the period of struggle. The study employs a theoretical framework focusing on the concept of legitimacy as developed by Max Weber and other scholars. The theoretical approach expands the application of the term ‘legitimacy’ by including concepts such as revolutionary ideology, and performance, or eudaemonic legitimacy. Revolutionary ideology plays a vital role in helping a liberation movement to garner support and political legitimacy from the population during a conflict. It also arises through the invocation of universal values such as freedom, equality, and social justice democracy. Equally important is performance or eudaemonic legitimacy, which is measured by the ability of a former liberation movement to fulfil its revolutionary promises in the aftermath of (violent) conflict. Such a process entails the fulfilment and deliverance of ideals of liberation earlier promised during a struggle period. The promises may include the provision of security, public goods, and welfare to the citizens. However, in comparison to motives, objectives and aspirations of the SPLM/A during the liberation war against the central government in Khartoum, key findings on SPLM/A’s trajectory from a rebel movement to a government in the post-conflict period are not encouraging. The optimism, the hard-won jubilation, and the revolutionary legitimacy that catapulted the SPLM/A to power and the subsequent secession and independence in July 2011 quickly began to wane. The study found that SPLM/A’s legitimacy in the post-CPA and independence period continues to decline, and the South Sudanese do not enjoy the fruits of the liberation struggle. The findings also indicate that the SPLM/A is stuck in a political limbo: it retains many traits of a liberation movement, while its free ride during the CPA-mandated interim period en route to forming South Sudan’s first government has in effect worked against its aspiration to transform into a legitimate political party

    2015 GREAT Day Program

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    SUNY Geneseo’s Ninth Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1009/thumbnail.jp

    The Role of Musical Participation and Improvisation in Social Change

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    Many disciplines of musicology are dedicated to unravelling the connections between music and society. However, we lack a thorough understanding of music’s role in actively changing society. This thesis contributes to remedying that with a focus on musical participation and improvisation. It specifically aims to (1) understand how music contributes to social change in general; (2) discover what kinds of social changes tend to be effectively animated by musical participation and improvisation; and (3) explain why such participatory and improvisatory musics are effective. This occurs across the theoretical, empirical, and practical domains. The first half of the thesis synthesises existing literature and original empirical findings to produce a framework explaining what social change is, how musical participation and improvisation can contribute to it, and through which mechanisms this occurs. It proposes four themes that participation and improvisation afford, namely uniting heterogeneity, direct experience, enhanced agency, and novelty and adaptation. I then use this framework to analyse the cacerolazo protests during the 2001-2002 Argentine financial crisis to understand this participatory and improvisatory music’s capacity for large-scale change. Finally, these findings are applied practically in a highly participatory and improvisatory musical created in collaboration with local First Nations musicians entitled Togetherness Through Music. The intention of this event was to positively transform the meta-conflict between First Nations and settler Australians, and Chapter Five's evaluation of this event furthers our understanding of how participation and improvisation might effectively do this. Together, this work will enhance our understanding of musical participation and improvisation’s role in social change at various levels of society. It will also demonstrate the best practices for changemakers that intend to use them to better the world

    The Dark Arts. A Future For Practitioners of Architecture.

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    Many practitioners experience dissonance between the potential of their field and the realities of practice as defined by status-quo conventions. The forces that shape practice create inefficiencies, barriers to opportunity, and amplify contingency across the built environment. This work aims to establish a new mode of practice that can flow around the status-quo, with the extended goal of accessing a means to impact problems on a systemic plane. This dissertation follows a practice-based design science research methodology. Beginning with a critical dissection of the architectural profession, it progresses via a series of representational and reflective tools that illustrate an emergent framework for the ‘creative project’: the conception, design, and implementation of a novel strategic design practice, called ‘Future Workshop’ (FW). This is developed in parallel with (and in contrast to) an existing architectural practice (DWA). The strategic design approach synthesizes new professional methods from architecture and other disciplines, allowing client organizations to target higher-order problems upstream of typical design engagements, focusing the impact of future design efforts on the most important goals and priorities. The research traverses the tensions between the pragmatic and intellectual hemispheres of practice and establishes metrics for considering these abstract problems through a particular series of diagrams and representational tokens, or ‘glyphs’. The contribution of this work is multivalent, including a novel way of operating a design practice (FW), and new means of inquiry, proposing situated methodologies for research within professional practice

    The Radical Relationality of Complex Partnerships: Community-Member Experiences in Critical Community-Based Learning

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    Through a radical relationality within the social-ecological systems that sustain us, critical community-based learning (CBL) in higher education offers a praxis for engaging the demanding pedagogical and community challenges we face. When CBL is implemented as both a critical and sustainability pedagogy, as a strategy for social change, the relationships created by CBL partnerships have the potential to generate transformational outcomes for all partnership agents. Using a critical complexity theoretical framework, a bricolage of complexity science and critical theory, this critical qualitative study sought to understand the systemic patterns and behaviors of a community-based learning partnership by elevating community-member voices. Situated within a CBL partnership engaged with the Capstone Program at Portland State University, this study\u27s methods included dialogical engagement with CBL community-members, university Capstone students, and partnership leaders in reflexive focus groups, and ethnographic participant-observation. The results revealed the primacy and centrality of relationships in the CBL partnership. Further, three emergent outcomes for partnership agents were generated by partnership relationality, including: emergent identity development, ethical agency, and a dynamism of belonging and alienation. These emergent agent outcomes across all stakeholder groups were influenced by four key factors: the dynamism of the partnership system, place as a partnership agent, information sharing, the cultivation of relational awareness. The strategies suggested by this study’s findings attempt to (re)orient the field of community-based learning towards the complexity of our CBL partnerships, encouraging a radical relational paradigm shift in the partnership work happening between universities and their communities

    Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

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    Cultural and natural heritage are central to ‘Europe’ and ‘the European project’. They were bound up in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a ‘common European heritage’ provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of ‘new’ populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates. New discourses and ontologies are emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future. Taking the current role of heritage in Europe as its starting point, Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe presents a number of case studies that explore key themes in this transformation. Contributors draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to consider, variously, the role of heritage and museums in the migration and climate ‘emergencies’; approaches to urban heritage conservation and practices of curating cities; digital and digitised heritage; the use of heritage as a therapeutic resource; and critical approaches to heritage and its management. Taken together, the chapters explore the multiple ontologies through which cultural and natural heritage have actively intervened in redrawing the futures of Europe and the world
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