This work examines an art movement that was a direct outgrowth of a populist civil rights movement of the late 1960’s in the Southwest United States. This art, the Chicano Murals created as part of el Movimiento in San Diego, California was intended primarily as a didactic communication medium to reach into the barrios and marginalized neighborhoods for the primary purpose of carrying a resistance message to the semiliterate mestizo population within. Its secondary purpose was to bring a message from within these minority neighborhoods outward to the privileged elite, both Anglo and Hispanic, that within the confines of the barrio there exists a culture and heritage that has value. The Chicano Murals were ubiquitous throughout the southwest United States with concentration of the art in those areas adjacent to the Mexican border. This work examines some of the murals, and the politics associated with their creation principally in San Diego, California, and some activities in Los Angeles, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. This dissertation posits that it has been well established that art in public space is often a contentious matter and when it also carries a contra message, as did the Chicano murals, it may be considered intrusive and abrasive. The social environment into which these murals were insinuated--the public sphere, the intellectual territory of high art and the elite system of private and government cultural patronage, are examined in the context of their effect upon the mural content and conversely, the effects of these murals upon diversity in the high art and museology of the United States.

In past decades historians have become increasingly focussed on Native political activism in Canada. This has brought greater understanding to Native political issues and a degree of legitimization to Native political activism. Despite historians interest in Native politics, however, some general weaknesses remain within the historiography. In particular, there has been a general tendency to document the political actions only of eras known to be politically prominent. This practice has led to an abundance of studies focussed on the Riel Uprisings and the surge of Native activism in the 1960s but has left other periods such as the interwar era significantly underrepresented. When the interwar era is mentioned, it is generally done in order to frame such political activities as context for other issues. These tendencies have created the impression that Native political activism was sporadic and reactionary, and therefore, not an established and legitimate response to longstanding grievances. This thesis attempts to rectify this gap within the historiography of Native political activism in Saskatchewan by illustrating the extent to which Native peoples during the interwar era were politically active. In establishing that Saskatchewan Native political activism was a force throughout the interwar era, this thesis elucidates the reasons for the rise in political activism within Saskatchewan Native communities, tracing the development of First Nations and Métis political organizations which began in the early 1920s and 1930s. This work then draws attention to the political strategies developed by Natives to achieve their political goals. Highlighting the period between 1922 and 1946 as a politically significant era for Natives in Saskatchewan, this work fundamentally demonstrates that the challenges facing Native political actions did not result in a failure of Native political identities as one might expect, but rather forced adaptation and growth.

Recent decades have seen substantial changes in the U.S. political landscape. One particularly significant development has been the growing influence of a conservative coalition encompassing evangelical Christianity, interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal reform. This study explores the force and internal dynamics of this political assemblage. Based on fieldwork among conservative voters, volunteers and candidates in a small city in northwestern Ohio during a midterm election year, it probes the energy of conservative politics, its modes of attachment and influence, and the organizational forms through which it circulates. Contemporary conservative politics are shown to be centered on a particular epistemological intuition: that to be able to act, one must believe in something. This intuition implies an actively affirmative stance toward “beliefs” and “values.” The study also addresses methodological and analytical challenges that conservative politics pose for anthropological inquiry. It develops a “conversational” analytical attitude, arguing that in order to understand the lasting influence conservatism one has to take seriously the problems that it is oriented toward.

Sir William Macpherson's conclusion - following his public inquiry into the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 - that the Metropolitan Police was 'institutionally racist', was a seminal moment for policing in Britain. The publication of the Macpherson report in 1999 has been rightly regarded as a victory for the Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign (SLFC), whose activities had been crucial in building pressure on the newly-elected Labour Government to hold a public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's murder investigation. However, to focus solely on the Lawrence case, and the SLFC, is to obscure the existence of a longer struggle waged by black Londoners to expose the racism that had affected their experience of policing since the Second World War. This thesis explores the development of grassroots political activism within London's Afro-Caribbean community around the issue of policing from 1945 to 1993. Using material from local community archives, this thesis represents the first attempt at documenting the history of race and policing in London from the perspective of the capital's Afro-Caribbean population. Moreover, by taking the end of the Second World War as its starting point, it also breaks new ground in charting the way Afro-Caribbean people in London organised politically in opposition to racist policing prior to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Ever since people of Afro-Caribbean descent began to settle in London in increasing numbers in the aftermath of the Second World War, they have continually expressed concern about the way they were policed. While opposition to policing initially emerged in a highly unorganised form, this was fundamentally altered by the arrival of the British black power movement in the late 1960s. Despite its short existence, black power's emphasis upon independent black grassroots political activism outlived the movement and became a feature of the way black Londoners' challenged racist policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, this thesis contends that the grassroots political campaign that developed around the case of Stephen Lawrence cannot be viewed in isolation from the historical efforts of black people in London to expose racism within the Metropolitan Police.

This thesis takes a gender-sensitive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and asks whether and how Palestinian women’s different formal and informal political activism in ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘resistance’ can make a contribution to positive sustainable social and political change. Taking a bottom-up qualitative approach to conflict research, and deriving data mainly from in-depth interviews, participant observation and textual analyses, I problematise mainstream international conflict resolution and gender development approaches, revealing their mismatch with the Palestinian reality of prolonged occupation and settler colonialism on the ground. I critique in particular two aspects of mainstream gender and conflict approaches: Firstly, the essentialist feminist assertion that women are better ‘peacemakers’ than men due to their (alleged) more peaceful nature, and, secondly, the ‘liberal’ peace argument that dialogue is the best (and only) way to resolve conflict. These two claims are hardly applicable to the Palestinian context, and their implementation through policy programmes can even block genuine political and social change. Through their tendency to trace the roots of conflict in social gender relations and at the level of identity, they tend to give a distorted depoliticised picture of the conflict. Doing so, they risk alienating local constituencies and might even exacerbate social and political fragmentation. My analysis counters such (mostly western-originated) mainstream gender and conflict initiatives by starting from the local. Proposing a contextualised gender-sensitive approach to conflict transformation, which pays attention to intra-party dynamics such as ‘indigenous’ gender constructions and the political culture of resistance, I trace those forms of female political agency that are able to gain societal support and are conducive to sustainable social and political change. Bridging theoretical insights from the fields of conflict resolution and gender theory and questioning some of their widely held assumptions, I hope to contribute to knowledge in both fields.

Despite existing literature that demonstrates the relation between an attitude of social responsibility and activism; few studies have examined the underlying factor structure of social responsibility. The current study had two goals. The first goal was to examine the structure of a measure of social responsibility attitude for urban adolescents. The second goal was to examine the associations of social responsibility with civic and political activism. The participants were 221 adolescents from schools and youth serving organizations in metropolitan Atlanta, GA. Confirmatory factor analysis of social responsibility items revealed that a model with a single latent factor explained the data better than a two-factor model with one latent factor representing neighborhood social responsibility and the other representing global social responsibility. There were significant positive relations between social responsibility and civic activism and political activism when controlling for parental activism and peer activism. This study suggests that a social responsibility attitude may exist as a single factor amongst urban adolescents and it has added empirical support to show that higher levels of social responsibility are associated with greater depth of involvement in civic and political activism. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

The central question this thesis poses is how and why the modes of Palestinian political activism have changed from the first to the second intifada. The thesis will explore the underlying major political, territorial and social developments that created a new environment for the second uprising that was no longer conducive to the mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, which had dominated the first intifada in the late 1980s. The decline of civil society, the reassertion of Palestinian political factionalism and the unique geographical dislocation of the Palestinian territories, which created new physical obstacles to resistance but also caused division within society, were the key factors in reshaping the context of the second intifada. In addition, rising support for violent resistance among the population was rooted in the sense of hopelessness and frustration that re-emerged over the Oslo period. Much of the population’s frustration was directed at Israel’s colonial regime but in part it was also a response to the rule of the Palestinian Authority, which had failed to fulfil its commitments to its own population in view of its obligations under Oslo toward Israel. In the absence of alternative non-violent outlets within either politics or civil society, what took root instead was individual activism via militant organisations. As such, this thesis offers an account of the development of Palestinian political action (and in particular political violence) that is indebted to an effort to employ historical and contextual analysis in ways that deepen the insights available from explanations of behaviour drawn from political science.

Cette recherche explore l’articulation entre les « nouvelles gauches » révolutionnaires et les mobilisations argentines pour les droits de l’Homme à partir des années 1970. Mobilisant archives et entretiens, elle se situe entre sociologie politique et histoire des idées politiques pour reconstruire la trajectoire militante d’un collectif informel d’acteurs et en analyser les répertoires discursifs. La première partie met en évidence le rôle pionnier joué par les nouvelles gauches dans l’émergence des droits de l’Homme comme référence du discours militant en Argentine au début des années 1970. On assiste alors à un processus d’hybridation discursive mêlant radicalité politique et recours à un lexique juridique, dans un contexte de dictature. La deuxième partie montre comment, malgré la domination d’une conception libérale des droits de l’Homme, la spécificité de ce discours radical se préserve suite au retour à l’État de droit à partir des années 1980. Il se précise alors via une série de mises à l’épreuve (procès des juntes, incrimination du militantisme révolutionnaire, attaque d’un régiment militaire par un groupe de gauche armée). La troisième partie, enfin, souligne le fait que l’usage actuel de certaines notions (« génocide », « 30 000 disparus ») relatives au récit de la dictature ne peut être compris que s’il est réinscrit dans les trajectoires étudiées au préalable, lesquelles produisent des significations sui generis. Le répertoire discursif contemporain des droits de l’Homme révolutionnaires est en ce sens tributaire d’une longue évolution, qui rend compte de la fondation d’un nouveau sens commun radical démocrate au sein de la gauche argentine. / This research explores the relationship between the Argentinean revolutionary « New Lefts » and human rights mobilizations since the 1970s. Drawing on both archival work and interviews, it combines approaches from political sociology and the history of political ideas to reconstruct the trajectories of political activism of an informal group of actors, and proposes an analysis of their discursive repertoires. The first part shows that the New Lefts were pioneers in the emergence of human rights as a political discourse in Argentina in the early 1970s. This provided the basis for a hybridization process, in which political radicalness and the use of a juridical vocabulary were intertwined in a context of dictatorship. The second part shows how, although a liberal conception of human rights prevailed in the 1980s, this original radical discourse survived after the reestablishment of the rule of law. It developed and became more precise through a series of tests (trial of the juntas, incrimination of revolutionary activism, attack of a military unit by an armed left-wing group). The third part, lastly, underlines the fact that current uses of certain terms for describing and discussing the period of dictatorship (“genocide”, “30 000 disappeared”) can only be understood in line with the previously studied trajectories, which give them a sui generis meaning. In that perspective, the contemporary discursive repertoire of revolutionary human rights is the result of a long evolution and can only be understood in light of that evolution. Moreover, understanding this history sheds fresh light on how a new radical democratic common sense was established among the Argentinean left.

Although the graying of the American society has been well documented, the question as to whether the elderly populace will indeed become a political factor has yet to be determined. Some studies indicate that the elderly will soon develop the consensus needed for political action; other studies counter that the elderly will never be a viable political factor. Among the determinants listed as influencing the political participation equation are standard socioeconomic variables (e.g., race, social status, education, and income). These factors have been studied extensively (Campbell 1960; Key 1950; Milbrath 1965; Nagel 1987; Rose 1965). Trela recently added an item that could possibly influence the political activism of the elderly: membership in age-graded associations. This study addresses the questions raised by Trela (1971), namely, whether age-graded associations influence the political activity of senior citizens, and if so, in what direction elderly participation is swayed. Unlike previous reports, the preliminary data gathered for this study suggest that the age-graded associations of the elderly cannot accurately predict their political activism.

ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the enduring leadership of community activists Dorothy Bolden, Ella Mae Wade Brayboy, and Pearlie Dove from 1964 until 2015. Brayboy was one of the first African-American Deputy Voter Registrars in the state of Georgia, Bolden founded the National Domestic Workers Union and Dove was the first woman to head the department of education at Clark College. This dissertation inserts Dorothy Bolden, Ella Mae Wade Brayboy, and Pearlie Dove into the classic Civil Rights Movement narrative by framing their community advocacy as equal to the efforts of Atlanta’s more well-known African-American leaders. This dissertation presents Bolden, Brayboy, and Dove as career-oriented professional women who were also politically savvy community activists. These three women acquired a power base that allowed them to found organizations, create programming, and develop projects dedicated to empowering Atlanta’s black community. These women achieved a level of influence typically associated with the wealthy or the political prominent. Because the three women were grassroots organizers, this study contends that the implications of their activism have been obscured because of gender, race, and class. This study seeks to foreground Bolden, Brayboy, and Dove’s efforts in Atlanta’s Movement narrative. In this dissertation, assessments of Bolden, Brayboy, and Dove’s professional contributions as acts of protest on behalf of the black community are used to undergird a critical intervention; first, their work refutes previous ideology centering the efficacy of Movement leadership (as a social movement) as grounded in mass mobilization. Secondly, their leadership was oppositional to the standard portraiture of Movement leadership as male, ministerial, and middle-class. Finally, the women’s professional and activist emphases on economic uplift, education, and enfranchisement illustrate evidence of how sustained acts of protest, led by local leadership, impacted the community. Because there is considerably less literature focused on the historical significance of black women acquiring political power outside of elected office, this study seeks to establish the women as politically significant local leadership.