Degrowth is an emerging field of research and a social movement founded on the premise that perpetual economic growth is incompatible with the biophysical limits of our finite planet (D’Alisa, Demaria & Kallis, 2014a; Asara, Otero, Demaria & Corbera, 2015). Despite the important work that degrowth scholars and activists have done to broadcast the fundamental contradiction between endless compound growth and a finite resource base, degrowth remains politically marginal, having received little mainstream attention or policy uptake. This thesis explores why. In particular, I examine barriers to and pathways towards the uptake of degrowth in Canada, a country that disproportionately contributes to climate breakdown. To do so I ask: 1) What barriers exist to advancing a degrowth agenda in Canada?; 2) How specifically do those barriers block degrowth from taking hold in contemporary Canadian policy and political discourse?; 3) How (if at all) are Canadian activists seeking to address these barriers? This research reveals that the political economy in Canada, and the way that is expressed in concentrations of elite and corporate power has given certain actors, particularly the fossil fuel industry, immense economic and political power. These concentrations of power, and the ways they are maintained reinforce a politics and discourse that is highly antithetical to the politics of degrowth, and thus serve as a major barrier to the emergence of degrowth. I argue, in order to move towards a degrowth politics, the hegemony of fossil capitalism in Canada, and the specific class interests that support it needs to be challenged. While degrowth has a strong critique of economic growth and capitalism, this alone is not enough. Any movement towards degrowth will require transforming power relations. This means continuing to explore the concrete ways specific institutions continue to create the political economic conditions that support fossil fueled growth as its main priority, and prioritizing building broad based movements to counter them. / Graduate

Cette thèse se propose d’étudier la politique linguistique de la Chine, à travers le prisme du mouvement pour la défense du cantonais apparu durant l’été 2010, le contexte général étudié étant celui allant des années 1950 à aujourd'hui. Durant l’été 2010, plusieurs manifestations au nom de la défense du cantonais ont eu lieu à Guangzhou, capitale de la province du Guangdong (Chine) et à Hong Kong, donnant lieu à des retombées médiatiques et des effets différés sur le plan politique en Chine. Cette affaire a révélé un sujet longtemps mis à l’écart dans l’aménagement linguistique de la Chine: celui des dialectes. Lors de la campagne de promotion du mandarin en 1955, peu d’attention avait été accordée au statut des autres langues du groupe Han, conventionnellement regroupées sous le terme de « dialectes ». Sous l’influence de l’urbanisation, de la mondialisation et de la promotion du mandarin, les dynamiques sociolinguistiques sont devenues de plus en plus complexes et diversifiées au sein du territoire. La demande pour trouver un point d’équilibre entre unité et diversité devient de plus en plus importante dans l’aménagement linguistique du pays. Reposant sur le débat autour du cantonais, cette étude s’attache à comprendre la synergie entre les pratiques, les aménagements et les idéologies linguistiques, ainsi que l’articulation des perspectives macro et microsociales dans la politique linguistique de la Chine. Elle met enfin en lumière le fait que si la politique linguistique intérieure chinoise est désormais l’objet d’une attention académique soutenue en Chine, elle le doit en partie au mouvement pour la défense du cantonais en 2010. / This study aims to examine the language policy of China through the prism of the “Movement for the defense of Cantonese” which happened during the summer of 2010. The general context studied is from the 1950s to the present days. In the summer of 2010, several demonstrations in the name of defending Cantonese broke out in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, resulting in numerous media spillovers and a series of political effects. The debate revealed a topic which has long been neglected in China’s language planning: the question of dialects. Ever since the beginning of the Mandarin promotion campaign in 1955, little attention has been paid to the status of other languages of the Han ethnic group, conventionally called "dialects". Nowadays, as China’s language situation is becoming more and more dynamics and complex under the influence of urbanization, globalization and the promotion of Mandarin, the demand for a balance between unity and diversity has become increasingly important in the country’s domestic language planning. Based on the debate over Cantonese, this study tries to understand the synergy between practice, management and ideology as well as the articulation of macro and micro perspectives in China's language policy. It also highlights the fact that if China’s domestic linguistic policy is now in the spotlight of academic attention in China, it owes partly to the movement for the defense of Cantonese in 2010.

Thesis advisor: Candace Jones / Online communities support collective action without many of the constraints that have belied collective actors and formal organizations in the past. They have become increasingly pervasive platforms for activism as well as potential catalysts for novelty in organizing practices. Scholars have shown that by leveraging affordances of the Internet, these communities have displaced or become complements to face-to-face organizations such as churches, community centers, labor unions and political groups that have traditionally structured civic engagement. Few empirical studies, however, systematically address how processes ranging from mobilization to the coordination of complex, large-scale collective action and practices that enable and support these processes are different in online environments. In this dissertation, I provide conceptual background that supports the study of online communities as dynamic and diverse modes of civic engagement. I reveal how locations, boundaries, interactions and identities are instantiated differently in online communities, influencing processes and practices that are crucial to social change. Using Internet-based ethnographic methods, I examine: (1) how an online community called `Anonymous' experiences shifts in purpose as it transitions from being focused on recreation to becoming both an incubator and support system for several social change projects and (2) how the community adopts a repertoire of coordinating practices that allows it to organize complex projects. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

Using the example of a locality this thesis examines the key elements of the new public health from a geographic perspective. Three voluntary groups (based in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets) have been examined as a case study of expressions of the new public health. The thesis argues that the new public health is an urban social movement, which has expressions at the local level which vary. It is argued that this variance results from the key elements which inform and shape the new public health. They are the nature of the public health activities and initiatives carried out; the organisation and representation of the groups that make up the movement; and the knowledge and activities informed by sense of the place that the groups have. The sense of place of the groups collectively, and the individuals within the groups, informs what public health activities and initiatives are implemented based on perceived need. The sense of place of the area is also the main mobilising factor for the agents who make up the public health groups and hence the new public health movement. The new public health movement is an urban social movement organised at a number of different geographical levels and in particular at the local and international levels. In discussing and describing how the new public health is a social movement, the thesis contends that previous exploration of social movements has failed to examine the importance that place has to the organisation and shape that movements take. This thesis, through a geographic analysis, constructs a new framework for looking at urban social movements with an emphasis on place. It also outlines how an geographical analysis of the new public health can broaden the focus of current research within medical geography by examining health within the wider context of society.

The study of ideology has long interested sociologists and consumer researchers alike. Much consumption research has approached ideology from various macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. However, many studies fail to address the dialogical interplay among these three levels of analysis when examining how ideology manifests in, and interacts with, consumer identity projects. Many consumption-based studies examining ideology provide descriptive and normative accounts, affording practices of consumption emancipatory potential. In response, this research adopts a critical marketing perspective in order to draw out the macro and political implications of meso cultural production systems and micro consumption experiences and identity projects. Focusing on the contemporary American feminist movement, and on discourses around sex and sexuality, it explores how hegemonic (patriarchal) and counterhegemonic (feminist) ideologies are communicated in the marketplace, through the media, to understand their role in regard to consumers’ lived experiences and interactions with advertisements. Working within the consumer culture theory tradition, this thesis employed a variant of phenomenological interviewing that explored female emerging adults’ sexual narratives and their interpretations of sexualized ads. By generating data on a specific type of experience, inferences were drawn about how young women experience and relate to the contemporary feminist movement. In total, 14 American women, aged 20 to 31, were interviewed twice and also created media collages of what they considered ‘sexy’. Implementing a multi-step hermeneutic analysis, the data were analyzed through an iterative process, moving back and forth between the idiographic cases and theory. Through multiple iterations, micro, meso, and macro level inferences were made. This study suggests that young women foster diverse and temporary identifications with feminism in the pursuit of two, often overlapping, goals: ontological security and status. This results in a micro process of ‘ideological shifting’, which has depoliticizing effects, insofar as (anti-) feminist brands and identities were readily appropriated and discarded depending on specific contexts and situations. Thus, contrary to much work in the consumer culture theory tradition, which presents consumption as having transgressive and liberating effects, this study finds that while the young women had the power to dialogically interact with marketized (meso level) ideologies that constitute the marketplace, they failed to intercept the macro level processes of marketization and commodification and consequently did not challenge the hegemonic (patriarchal) ideology at large. In adopting a critical perspective, this study offers valuable insight into the relationship between ideology and consumer behavior. Ideology is shown to be disseminated via hegemonic processes of commodification and marketization. Because these processes occur at a macro level, counterhegemonic ideologies are hegemonized and subsequently depoliticized before even reaching the consumer on a micro level. By examining ideology across all three levels, this study finds that consumer agency is largely relegated to the realm of the marketplace, where consumers’ dialogical interactions and consumption practices do not challenge the macro ideologies or oppression at large, but merely alter their marketplace expressions.

This thesis investigates the effects of participating in activism on the people who struggle for social change. Using a critical pedagogical framework, the study contributes to the theorisation of 'social movement learning' by drawing distinctions between processes, outcomes and implications of learning, and by developing the concepts '(un)learning'and 'pedagogical adversaries'. The research examines how activists who participate in social and political action develop different perspectives of social change. The conclusions draw on data collected throughout 2014, specifically interviews with, and observations of, UK-based Egyptian activists who engaged in social action during the continuing 25 January revolution between 2011-2014. As activists reflect on their understandings in the context of revolution and counter-revolution, coup d'etat, elections, strikes and various forms of social and political change, they reveal many 'pedagogical entry points'. The findings illustrate that social movements are continuous processes and sites of important, rich and potentially transformative learning because they generate pedagogical moments through which activists can engage with and develop critical perspectives of the way the world is and should be. Analysis of social movement learning as (un)learning exposes the cumulative and continuing nature of learning and unlearning, and generates important insights into how social movements challenge established 'knowledge' and 'truths' to create progressive alternatives. Drawing on critical and radical theories of social change, the thesis demonstrates the importance of continuing to question conceptualisations of social change and of a political imagination that understands the pedagogical potential of disjuncture and challenge.

Durante as investigações da Conjuração Baiana de 1798, um grupo de homens de muita opulência e luzimento, qualificados por Luís dos Santos Vilhena de corporação dos enteados, fez pronta-entrega de seus escravos à justiça para livrarem-se da acusação de prática sediciosa no final do século XVIII, na capitania da Bahia. Esse episódio foi o ponto de partida para se comprovar a participação de pessoas dos médios e altos setores da sociedade soteropolitana na Conjuração Baiana de 1798, cujas demandas explicitadas nos boletins manuscritos eram inconciliáveis em seus termos, uma vez que o projeto político dos médios setores, os milicianos, vislumbrava a mudança dos hierarquizados critérios sociais que os impediam de participarem do universo político e ascenderem na carreira militar, e o projeto político dos altos setores, a corporação dos enteados, objetivava a conservação das regras do Sistema Colonial, que até então os tratava como enteados nas dinâmicas políticas e econômicas do Império Português. A documentação demonstra que o recrudescimento do pacto colonial anunciado pelas reformas modernizantes de d. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho desencadeou uma tomada de consciência da exploração colonial, fazendo com que os altos setores da sociedade soteropolitana do final do século XVIII reivindicassem a internalização de seus interesses econômicos e a manutenção de seus privilégios ameaçados com a possibilidade do fim dos monopólios, dos morgados, da mudança na forma de arrematação dos ofícios de fazenda e justiça, e da manutenção da prorrogação da arrematação dos dízimos para os negociantes portugueses. Após uma aliança programática com o contingente armado da capitania da Bahia, os médios e altos setores do Partido da Liberdade deflagraram o movimento com a publicação dos boletins manuscritos, explorando ao limite os dois principais medos no horizonte de expectativas da coroa portuguesa naquele conflituoso final de século: a miragem do livre comércio e a invasão francesa. Abertas as devassas para a investigação dos autores dos boletins manuscritos e dos partícipes do movimento, os altos setores recuaram, entregaram seus escravos à justiça e formularam as principais culpas que condenaram à pena de morte homens dos médios setores. Tratam-se, portanto, de elementos que permitem a análise da Conjuração Baiana de 1798 como um movimento de contestação política ocorrido em duas fases, durante o período de 1796-1800, contando com a efetiva participação dos altos e médios setores da sociedade soteropolitana da época. O enforcamento em praça pública dos réus da Conjuração Baiana de 1798, portanto, é paradigmático do fato de que projeto político vencedor foi o conservador, na medida em que a coroa portuguesa empreendeu uma série de soluções de compromisso com a corporação dos enteados, garantindo-lhes a internalização de seus interesses e a manutenção de seus privilégios, que os constituíam no setor dominante daquela sociedade, base social fundamental para a sustentação do poder monárquico português continuar a governar a conflitualidade no interior dos setores dominantes da sua principal colônia. / During the investigations of the Conjuração Baiana of 1798, a group of men with \"opulence and brightness\" qualified by Luís dos Santos Vilhena like the \"corporação dos enteados\", made a \"immediate delivery\" of their slaves to justice to rid themselves of charges of seditious practices in the late eighteenth century, at the captaincy of Bahia. This episode was the starting point to prove the participation of people from middle and higher social sectors of Salvador in the Conjuração Baiana of 1798, whose demands spelled out in manuscript bulletins were incompatible on their own terms, once the political project of the middle sectors, the militiamen, glimpsed the change of hierarchical social criteria that prevented them from participating in the political world and ascend in the military, and the political project of the upper sector, the corporação dos enteados, aimed at keeping the rules of the Colonial System, which until then was treated as \"enteados\" in the political and economic dynamics of the Portuguese Empire. The documentation shows that the intensification of the colonial pact announced by the modernizing reforms of d. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho triggered an awareness of colonial exploitation, making new claims of the higher social sectors of Salvador in the late eighteenth century to the internalization of its economic interests and maintain their privileges threatened with the possibility of the end of monopolies, of the morgados, the change in the auction of justice and treasury permissions, and maintaining the extension of auction of tithes to the Portuguese merchants. After a programmatic alliance with the armed contingent of the captaincy of Bahia, the middle and upper sectors of the Partido da Liberdade sparked the movement with the publication of manuscript bulletins, exploring the limits the two main fears on the horizon of expectations of the Portuguese crown at the end of that turbulent century: the mirage of free trade and the french invasion. With the start of the investigations to define the authors of these manuscripts and from participants of the movement, the higher sectors retreated, delivering their slaves to justice and formulating the main proves that condemned to death those men from the middle social sector. These elements allow the analysis of Conjuration Baiana of 1798 as a movement of political contestation that occurred in two phases, during the 1796-1800 period, with the effective participation of upper and middle social sectors of Salvador at the time. The hanging in public square of the defendants of the Conjuração Baiana of 1798, therefore, is paradigmatic of the fact that the winners political project was the conservative, in that sense that the Portuguese crown undertook a series of compromises with the corporação dos enteados, ensuring them to internalize their interests and maintain their privileges, which allows them to constitute the dominant sector of that society, and was fundamental to sustaining the continuance of Portuguese monarchy to govern the conflict within the dominant sectors of its main colony.

This dissertation focuses on three different organizational approaches to introducing change in the Global South. In so doing, it explores how organizations can design and structure 'solutions' for deep-rooted social problems and support marginalized groups who lack voice to speak for themselves. Theoretically, I draw on institutional theory and social movement theory, and it is to these perspectives that my research seeks to contribute. Empirically, my work focuses on Tanzania, Indonesia and Nigeria. Studying how and why three different types of organizational forms - including a social enterprise (Paper 1), a quasi-social movement (Paper 2) and a social movement (Paper 3) - succeeded or failed in their attempts to introduce change in the Global South provides an intriguing opportunity to build new theoretical insights and to shed light on strategic and organizational processes about which relatively little is known.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology that is developed with the aim of decreasing the emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in order to mitigate global climate change. However, citizens strongly oppose the technology in areas where carbon storages are supposed to be constructed. With the help of framing theory, this work analyzes four German anti-CCS citizens’ initiatives. Qualitatively studying publicly available material from their websites, their diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames on the issue are reconstructed. Guided by a first research question about what frames on CCS are constructed by the citizens’ initiatives, the frames are then compared to each other, showing that political opportunity structures as well as local factors regarding particularly the prevalent type of energy production are taken up to some extent. Systematically retracing the arguments, this study aims on investigating into the connections between local and global issues and interests around CCS. This entails potential for generalization regarding the decision-making process in the area of conflict when society, environment, technology, economic and political actors are involved. Afterwards, a second research question is taken up – the frames’ relation to sustainability. They are discussed in the wider context of sustainable development because of the close connection between the climate change and the sustainability discourse. Moreover, proponents as well as opponents use parts of the sustainability concept for their arguments. This highlights the difficulties of a sustainable decision-making process in which a variety of interests are interwoven and partly contradicting each other. It is concluded that both, comprehensive information and transparent communication, between all actors are the first steps towards a more sustainable decision-making process but that structurally as well as technically more than this is required, especially regarding the acceptance of the outcome. Research on sustainability as an increasingly influential paradigm can pave the way in this regard.

Reform as a social process is underresearched in the case of Tibet. This study addresses this gap using Social Movement Theory, which sees social change as a complex process involving various Tibetan social groups and external reformers, the Communist Party of China (CPC). This approach was applied by comparing recruitment and mobilization efforts of several key internal and external reform movements in 20th century Tibetan history. Findings include that internal reform failures can be explained by their narrow social and geographic basis and limited mass appeal. Moreover, initial CPC reforms succeeded through recruitment and mobilization across Tibetan regions and social groupings. Subsequent reforms failed due to decreased attention to recruitment and mass mobilization of Tibetans. A major implication of the study is that understanding social reform in today’s Tibet requires a SM Theory approach, which currently is lacking among scholars of the Tibetan question and political representatives of both sides.