Young Women Learning in Social Struggle

Based on a study conducted with young activists, this paper discusses social movement learning and the personal and social transformations it fosters. The author presents a framework that broadens conventional interpretations of political economy by adding patriarchy and white supremacy to capitalism, as systems of domination, and as points of analysis

The politics of indigenous social struggle in Colombia

The core research question that this thesis asks is: How can we conceptualize the resistance of contemporary indigenous social movements? This thesis argues that Arturo Escobar\u27s ideas about the ways in which social movements can critically engage processes of development best allow us to conceptualize Nasa indigenous social movements of Colombia as resistance to neoliberal globalization. The thesis uses Escobar’s three concepts: alternative development, alternative modernity, and alternatives to modernity as a conceptual lens with which to analyze three projects by the Nasa indigenous people of Colombia: the communitarian economy, the Proyecto Global, and the Tul home garden project. The thesis finds that the communitarian economy can be characterized as both a project of alternative development and alternative modernity; Proyecto Global can be considered a project of alternative modernity; and the Tul home garden project can be considered a project of alternative modernity

Theses on the Relationship between Rights and Social Struggle

This article examines the relationship between rights and social struggle. This topic is revisited in light of the phenomenon of rising inequality in the aftermath of the last capitalist crisis, which reignited the debate on the role of rights in processes of social mobilisation. In this context, this paper examines three very recent contributions to this debate, namely Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Radha D’Souza’s What’s Wrong with Rights, and Paul O’Connell’s work on a critique of the displacement thesis. In critically discussing these contributions it introduces and elaborates on six theses which describe the relationship between rights and social struggle. The argument focuses on the important role of rights in the struggle between different social forces, as well as their limitations in promoting a critique of the structural roots of social inequality

Opening the System: (Re)Writing Value Theory Discursively

In this article I argue that modern and postmodern critics of value theory share the premise that Marx’s theory of value disables the project of emancipatory social change. The modern critics claim the theory is logically flawed and must be either resituated in a consistent logical framework or replaced by a Sraffian alternative. The postmodern critics claim that the theory is necessarily reductionist and excludes or renders secondary important axes of social struggle. I argue that by using a poststructural logic, Marx’s theory of value can be interpreted in a way that both overcomes the perceived consistencies of the modern critics and is nonreductionist, allowing for the integration of noneconomic aspects of social struggle

City and Citizen: Community-Making as Legal Theory and Social Struggle

The Eighth Annual LatCrit Conference met in Cleveland in May, 2003 to engage a timely and topical theme - City and Citizen: Operations of Power, Strategies of Resistance. Importantly, the theme explicitly drew critical attention not only to operations of power but also to strategies of resistance, and thereby implicitly invited LatCritical analysis of how the two converge in the messy and multifaceted processes of building communities on any human scale. To open and introduce this symposium, this Foreword similarly proceeds in two parts: the first Part, reviewing the four clusters of essays comprising the symposium, focuses mostly on operations of power and the critiques proffered by the symposium authors that follow this Foreword; the second Part, focusing mostly on strategies of resistance, examines the human acts and legal regimes giving rise to a marginal Latina/o community within the existing minority enclaves of one major city of the United States. In both instances, however, this Foreword seeks to elucidate how this year\u27s theme and conference - and the following symposium based on them - embrace and advance the longstanding commitment to community building that has become a key hallmark of LatCrit theory and praxis during the past eight years. This Foreword, in short, aims to remind us all that community-making, at its best, is a key - perhaps indispensable - form of collective praxis in the service of social struggle for social justice. This Foreword endeavors to help ensure that LatCrit theory, community and praxis remain as intertwined in the future as this symposium shows they are today

Eloquent fragments: French fiction film and globalization

French (and Franco-Belgian) cinema has witnessed a return to the real since the middle of the 1990s and should thus successfully have pinned down the impact of the globalizing economy on the sociopolitical sphere. Yet neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the frame of conventional fictions. Condemned to be a cinema of fragments by the shattering of the old leftist imaginary, has French cinema merely tracked globalization's local consequences, always letting systemic causes escape its grasp? Or has it identified successful strategies with which to restore eloquence to social struggle and suffering that otherwise seemed condemned to silence? Engaging with important films by the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Bertrand Tavernier, Manuel Poirier, Matthieu Kassovitz and others, this paper argues the latter. French film, it suggests, has found ways to make the fragments speak to the totality, to short-circuit neoliberal triumphalism and to interpellate a nation that no longer plays its erstwhile integrational role. While none of these strategies can provide totalizing systemic critique, they do show that cinema is playing an active role in the rebuilding of a radical oppositional imaginary

Creating Spaces to Build Alternatives: The Growing Movement Against Water Privatization in Ghana

This paper examines the movement against water privatization. First I trace the development of social struggle in Ghana. I then outline the issues in the debate over water privatization. Finally I describe development in the movement against water privatization, and their significance

From Outsiders to On-Paper Equals to Cultural Curiosities? The Trajectory of Diversity in the USA

This paper examines the genesis and trajectory of diversity in the USA. It argues that unfortunately diversity was more a product of market interests and differential processes in the recruitment of workers at different times and for different purposes than a smooth process of incorporation of immigrant groups from different cultures and continents. At the end, diversity assumed a highly hierarchical form with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top within a framework of manifest destiny and inequality. Confronting an unequal status, non-whites engaged in group-based struggles that transformed them into political communities and the process into a social struggle. The paper concludes with a call for European countries to learn from this experience and try to preempt it by moving to incorporate newcomers in such a way that they become fully contributing members of the societies they enter within a mutually transforming processDiversity, Race Relations, Racial Politics, Immigrants, Identity Formation