This thesis is concerned with the identification, description, analysis and evaluation of the rhetorical strategies and tactics of the Black Panther Party as a specific social-change movement from 1966 to 1973. Evidence is presented to indicate that the rhetorical strategies and tactics of the Black Panther Party played a vital role in the movement's rise and decline and that their choice of a power orientation and a rhetoric of coercion brought about the decline of the movement. This study also indicates that rhetoric in a social movement is of crucial importance to the development of the movement's ideology, leadership, membership, and methods for effecting change.

An individual's initial acceptance of a recruitment pitch from a community-based social movement organization is usually based upon minimal information about the group and its efforts. It is only during the subsequent period of orientation that new members begin to learn more about the organization. During this period, the retention of new members is dependent on the successful alignment of individual and organizational frames. The failure to achieve such an alignment is likely to result in the new member's departure from the organization. This study explores the frame alignment process during early orientation to community-based SMOs. Using nineteen qualitative interviews with three different community organizing efforts in Baltimore, the study suggests that organizational members feel most motivated to continue involvement when they feel that the organization is effective.

This thesis examines the history of urban squatting in East and West Berlin from c. 1970 to c.1990. In doing so, it explores the relationship between urban space, opposition and conformity, mainstream and alternative cultures, as well as questions of identity and belonging in both halves of the formerly divided city. During Berlin’s history of division, illegal squatting was undertaken by a diverse range of actors from across the period’s political and Cold War divides. The practice emerged in both East and West Berlin during the early 1970s, continuing and intensifying during the following decade, before the traditions of squatting on both sides of the Berlin Wall converged in 1989-­‐90, as the city’s – and Germany’s – physical division was overcome. Squatting, this thesis argues, provides an important yet little studied chapter in Berlin’s – and indeed Germany’s – post-­‐war history. What is more, it provides an example of the ways in which, during the period of Cold War division, Berlin’s and Germany’s symbolic meaning was not only contested between East and West, but was, within the respective societies, also re-­‐interpreted from below. Drawing on a broad range of archival sources, this thesis compares and contrasts the experience of squatters on both sides of the Berlin Wall, and the ways in which the respective polities responded to this phenomenon. Broadly similar paradigms of urban renewal, this thesis argues, account for not only parallels in the temporality but also the geography of squatting in East and West Berlin. In both Berlins, this thesis demonstrates, the history of squatting was interconnected with that of domestic opposition and political dissidence. Moreover, squatting contributed to the emergence of alternative urban lifestyles, which sustained comparable urban sub-­‐cultures on both sides of the Cold War divide. Perhaps counter-­‐intuitively, this thesis argues that, East Germany’s apparatus of control notwithstanding, the relationship between squatters and the authorities in the GDR was generally more consensual than it was between their counterparts in West Germany and West Berlin. The thesis not only points to the limits of the totalitarian model of interpretation when applied to late Socialist society in the GDR, but also questions the dominant historiographical trend of studying the two Germanys in isolation from one another. Taking its cue from a number of influential scholars, this thesis asserts the importance of incorporating the experiences of both East and West Germany into a narrative of the nation’s divided past. Through identifying and analysing the overarching variable of urban squatting, this thesis attempts to develops a perspective that regards the post-­‐war history of East and West Germany as part of a wider whole.

In this dissertation, I examine the internal divisions in LGBT/Q communities. I illustrate how the notion of a single, unified community is not only fictive, but counter to the goals of liberation. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, I examine cultural artifacts of the contemporary gay rights movement to determine who has the power to shape domestic and international gay rights discourse. I analyze the role of gay citizenship through the same-sex marriage debates, the creation of the homonational soldier, and how gay rights is employed in international conflicts to strategically promote some countries as progressive, while denouncing others as backwards. I argue that the gay rights movement does not address the needs of all members of LGBT/Q communities, but rather, focuses on the wants of the elite and privileged. Despite recent advances, the gay rights movement has been stunted by a limited and marginalizing focus on normalization. Lastly, I present a queer perspective on gay rights and reimagine a movement that is more courageous and inclusive.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the US prison system was expanding at an unprecedented rate. This research charts how prisoners at the nation’s largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as Angola, founded the Angola Special Civics Project to collectively organize for prison reform. Using a combination of oral history and archival research, this thesis argues that the Angola Special Civics Project emerged during an era of political opportunity created by the coupling of political openings and contractions. Unlike outside advocates who focused their reform efforts on internal conditions, the Angola Special Civics Project centering of prisoners’ experiential knowledge led them to organize for an end to life sentencing through a combination of research, political education, electoral organizing, and coalition building. This thesis further asserts that their organizing should be conceptualized as a form of prison abolitionist reforms.

This dissertation research focuses on the development of South Korea’s democracy movement from 1979 to 1987, a time that was marked by two waves of sustained protest: one of which was brutally repressed while the other led to a transition to democracy. This dissertation examines the cultural processes at work during the period between these two waves. This study builds a dataset drawing on archival data in the form of memoirs, diaries, leaflets and brochures, minutes, statements, and testimonies of activists and activist organizations as well as newspaper reports and government documents. Using the dataset, this study advances scholarship on contentious politics and democratization by revising and expanding three theoretical concepts: threat, memory work, and framing.

This dissertation offers a unique examination of new cultures and forms of social movement organizing that include horizontal networking, non-hierarchical decision-making and governance combined with the importance of public visual art. Based on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how processes of neoliberalism and globalization have influenced youth organizing and shaped experiences of historical marginalization. What makes youth activism in Southern Mexico unique from that occurring elsewhere (i.e. Occupy Movements in U.S. and Europe) is the incorporation of indigenous organizing practices and identities with urban subcultures. At the same time, the movements I study share important characteristics with other social movements, including their reliance on direct-action tactics such as occupations of public space and sit-ins, as well as their creative use of digital media technologies (i.e. Arab Spring). This research contributes to the study of social movements and popular politics, globalization, culture and resistance, and the politics of space by examining how youth activists combine everyday practices and traditional social movement actions to sustain autonomous political projects that subvert institutional and spatial hierarchies. They do so through decentralized activist networks that resist cooptation by the state and traditional opposition parties, while at the same time contesting the spatial exclusion of marginalized communities from the city center. This research contributes a critical analysis of the limits of traditional models of social change through electoral politics and traditional opposition groups, such as labor unions, by challenging us to take seriously the innovative models of politics, culture and governance that Mexican youth are offering us. At a larger level, my work suggests the importance of genuinely engaging with alternative epistemologies that come from places we may not expect- in this case urban, indigenous, and marginalized youth. / 2015-10-03

Although rarely included in environmental sociology, settler colonialism significantly structures eco-social relations within the United States. This work considers the range of environmental practices and epistemologies influenced by settler colonial impositions in law, culture and discourse. In this dissertation I also introduce the term colonial ecological violence as a framework for considering the outcomes of this structuring in terms of the disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples and communities. / 2020-09-06

Orientador: Maria Orlanda Pinassi / Banca: Silvia Beatriz Adoue / Banca: Ricardo Luiz Coltro Antunes / Resumo: O desenvolvimento do capitalismo brasileiro vem se sustentando numa divisão social do trabalho capaz, cada vez mais, de produzir, à base da monocultura e do grande imóvel, bens agrícolas para o mercado externo. O setor sucroalcooleiro da região de Ribeirão Preto-SP desponta como um dos pólos mais sólidos dessa tendência. O elevado grau de produtividade econômica agrícola da região deu-se à custa de contradições sociais, dentre as quais se sobressai a superexploração do trabalho. Os critérios estipulados para aferir se um imóvel é produtivo ou improdutivo, baseiam-se em dados estatísticos de 1975/76 e até o hoje não foram atualizados, gerando mobilizações sociais de defesa da Reforma Agrária. As particularidades do desenvolvimento capitalista no Brasil levaram diversos setores da esquerda brasileira, a formularem teorias políticas de superação de nosso atraso econômico frente ao grande desenvolvimento das forças produtivas nos países capitalistas centrais. Este debate perpassa por diversas organizações de esquerda do Brasil, principalmente as ligadas ao campo (como o MST - Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), isto o torna extremamente atual e necessário para compreendê-lo e superá-lo através do levantamento de desafios concernentes a esta problemática. A Reforma Agrária, no caso brasileiro, reclama para si uma tarefa muito além de atingir patamares de produtividade altíssimos, exigidos pelo padrão de produção e consumo de mercadorias exportáveis / Abstract: The development of Brazilian capitalism has been sustaining a social division of labor capable, increasingly, to produce, based monoculture and large property, agricultural goods to foreign markets. The sugarcane sector in the region of Ribeirão Preto-SP emerges as one of the poles stronger this tendency. The high degree of economic productivity of the agricultural region occurred at the expense of social contradictions, among which stands out the overexploitation of labor. The criteria established to assess whether a property is productive or unproductive, are based on statistics from 1975/76 and until today have not been updated, generating social mobilizations in defense of Agrarian Reform. The particularities of capitalist development in Brazil led various sectors of the Brazilian left, to formulate political theories of overcoming our economic backwardness forward to the great development of the productive forces in the core capitalist countries. This debate goes through several leftist organizations in Brazil, mainly related to the field (such as the MST - Movement of Landless Rural Workers), this makes it extremely current and necessary to understand it and overcome it by surveying challenges concerning to this issue. Agrarian Reform in the Brazilian case, claims for itself a task far beyond reach very high levels of productivity required by the pattern of production and consumption of exportable goods / Mestre

Orientador: Maria Orlanda Pinassi / Banca: Silvia Adoue / Banca: Ricardo Antunes / Resumo: Procuro investigar as implicações sociais da hegemonia do agronegócio no campo brasileiro e sua relação com a perspectiva da realização de um amplo programa de Reforma Agrária. Para tal, desenvolvo uma pesquisa sobre um caso específico: a luta das mulheres da Via Campesina contra o grupo Cosan, colocando em evidência as tensões existentes entre dois projetos antagônicos. Analiso a questão a partir de um referencial teórico, cujo eixo central, foi delimitado anteriormente no projeto de pesquisa. Problematizo como a modernização conservadora, desenvolvida no período da Ditadura Militar, efetivou-se como uma resposta à questão da Reforma Agrária, que havia sido muito fomentada no período anterior. Procuro demonstrar como a modernização conservadora foi fundamental para desenvolver as bases da hegemonia atual no campo brasileiro: o agronegócio. Nesse contexto, a questão da Reforma Agrária, como uma possibilidade de desenvolvimento do capitalismo no campo, foi sendo superada. Diante disso, a Reforma Agrária pode ficar como uma tarefa para traz ou pode ser resignificada, trazendo novo sentido para a sociedade. Ambos os caminhos estão se defrontando na atualidade. Para entender o movimento do capital na agricultura, analiso o setor sucroenergético e mais especificamente, o caso da fusão entre as empresas Cosan e Shell, que deu inicio a criação do grupo Raízen. Procuro o sentido da Reforma Agrária resignificada através das ações desenvolvidas pelas mulheres da Via Campesina no período do dia internacional das mulheres. Tais lutas vinculam a conquista da Reforma Agrária ao enfrentamento contundente ao capital / Abstract: Seeking to investigate the social implications of the hegemony of agribusiness in the Brazilian countryside and its relationship with the prospect of carrying out an extensive program of land reform. To this end, I develop a search on a specific case: the struggle of women of Via Campesina against the group Cosan, highlighting the tensions between two opposing designs. I analyze the issue from a theoretical framework whose central axis was defined previously in the research project. I discuss how the conservative modernization, developed during the military dictatorship, was accomplished as an answer to the question of land reform, which had been very encouraged in the previous period. Seeking to demonstrate how the conservative modernization was essential to develop the foundations of the current hegemony in the Brazilian countryside: agribusiness. In this context, the issue of land reform, as a possibility of development of capitalism in the countryside, was being overcome. Therefore, the Agrarian Reform can get a job as backwards or can be resignified, bringing new meaning to society. Both paths are facing today. To understand the movement of capital in agriculture, analyze the sugarcane industry and more specifically, the case of the merger between Cosan and Shell, who launched the creation of Raizen group. Seeking the meaning of Agrarian Reform resignified through the actions undertaken by the women of Via Campesina during the international day of women. Such struggles bind the conquest of Agrarian Reform to facing scathing capital / Mestre