The decline in traditional methods of civic engagement is a cause for concern in many Western democracies. Similarly, studies of American party politics point to a transformation from locally-based volunteer organizations to national ones assisting candidate-centered, professionally-run campaigns, leaving little room for volunteer participants. This thesis analyses the recent resurgence of grassroots participation and organization in the United States. Using interpretive methods, I present a study of grassroots participants in Massachusetts Democratic Party primary campaigns in 2006. Primary documents, interviews with volunteers and paid members of field staff, and observations of canvassing work all detail the personal and organizational contexts of participation, illuminating the meanings individuals found in campaign work. Grassroots participation takes place in a loosely organized set of candidate-based campaigns, local party committees, and civic spheres. When participants first engage in this environment, they become socialized into a community with learned norms, practices, and ways of knowing. While those interviewed shared some of the motivations of party activists in previous studies, the motives and beliefs described by both professional organizers and volunteers were less policy focused than expected, and blurred the distinction between ideological and social categories. Indeed, while organizers and volunteers build distinct identities through their campaign participation, they share many more similarities than the literature on activism and professionalism in parties would suggest. Participants also serve a crucial role as translators between party elites and their fellow citizens, with important implications for linkage and the problem of decoupling. Rather than a return to traditional methods and structures of political engagement, the participants observed take part in and are building communities which have much in common with new forms of non-traditional participation. These findings contribute to the development of party organization theories and point towards the need for greater dialogue between scholars of party politics, organizational studies, and civic engagement.

This thesis is an exploration of the symbolic dimensions of activism in the SOA Watch movement, which seeks to close the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S. training facility for Latin American military and police. Through historical analysis, participant observation, and ethnographic interviews with activists, I examine the practices of activism in the SOA Watch movement and the systems of meaning that inform them. As activists in the movement engage a system of power they seek to change, they construct and locate this system in space and time. By inserting themselves into the history and geography of the SOA through practices of resistance, activists construct and enact their own agency.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between black millennial political activism and social media use. In Phase One of the study, the attitudes of 126 black 18-29 year olds were measured via survey. Results from the survey show that there is a significant relationship between social media use and political activism. In Phase Two, ten high-scoring participants from Phase One were interviewed and analyzed using thematic coding. Examination of the influence of social media on black millennials can inform strategy used for the advancement of black communities and black activism through widespread, effective communication and an advocacy platform accessible by all.

During the early part of the 21st century, a number of campus demonstrations and other protest acts on college and university campuses became highly visible nationally and internationally, largely thanks to social and traditional/popular media. This visibility was partially due to the ubiquitous and easily accessible nature of emergent digital technologies–cameras, cell phones and social networking sites, among other tools. Though campus protests and social movements began to proliferate nationally, and in the context of increased economic inequity, few studies sought to explore how campus actors (students and employees in particular) used social and popular media to shape and control public perception, specifically during highly visible campus conflicts. Further, much of the literature on campus activism has historically overlooked protests and social justice movements occurring on comprehensive state university and community college, or 2-year, campuses. Additionally, the literature does not offer a comprehensive examination of strategies surrounding pre-negotiated protest acts between campus activists, administrators and law enforcement officers. Also, the literature has not adequately examined responses to tactical strategies employed by law enforcement agencies during campus protest, and at a time of heightened militarization of officers. Both issues are related to the image-making capabilities of activists and administrators. To explore such issues, I set out to investigate how student and employee activists and also administrators construct meaning around the public good mission of higher education. I then explored how both groups public good conceptualizations to shape both action and public perception. In doing so, I employed a combined theoretical framework, modifying academic capitalism and co-cultural theories and adapting them into a single framework. My framework enabled the examination of power dynamics around interactions, discourse and space, ultimately leading to an understanding that the public good mission is a battleground. Within this frame, campus activists and administrators are struggling to both define and manifest the democratic imperative, or historic public good mandate, in different ways. The framework also allow for the study of why specific information is publicized or narrated, while other information is omitted or ignored. Using qualitative methods, I specifically studied how individuals seek to control involvement in democratic processes on campus based on definitions associated with the public good. I also studied ways individuals advance democratic ideals. Further, I explored what tools (including social media and traditional and/or popular media, also referenced collectively as "the press") individuals employ to shape public perception about equity issues and conflicts on campus. In this regard, social and popular media serve as conduits for informing public audiences. For my investigation, I purposefully selected one land-grant institution, a comprehensive state university, and one 2-year community college–all in California. I intentionally selected California, as the state has historically and continues to be seen an important forerunner for nationwide higher education policy and practice. I also chose campuses whose conflicts were receiving statewide and national media attention to allow for the investigation of public perception surrounding campus conflict. Doing so also allowed for the exploration of how those on campus employed social media strategies and also utilized popular media to attempt to shape and control the public image of their institutions. My findings suggest that while campus activists and administrators maintain a similar belief that public institutions should be broadly accessible, they differently conceptualize how the public good mission of higher education should manifest. The difference in framing of the public good complicates interactions between both groups, and at times leads to violent clashes during protest. My findings also suggest that while activists and campus officials both maintain a social media presence and interact with media representatives, administrators are not as successful in capturing public support. This appears especially true during and after clashes have occurred during campus protest acts that also involve campus law enforcement officers. Additionally, my findings indicate that the under-utilization of social media, lax media relations strategies and blame shifting, specifically during protest acts, may ultimately hurt administrators and law enforcement officers with regard to image-shaping efforts. Of note, the resulting coverage of violent clashes in the popular media tended to favor activists over administrators and law enforcement officers no matter the type and amount of pre-planning and pre-negotiations between activists and campus officials. Ultimately, my findings challenge perceptions that institutional image-making powers reside squarely with administrators and media relations offices. Given the widespread use of digital technologies and social media, and also strategies activists have employed to engage with members of traditional media outlets, my findings also illustrate how student and employee activists are changing how power is introduced and distributed within their campus communities.

I am a nomad. I have not had a place to call home in almost two decades. I wander around the world searching for a place to belong, only to discover the forgotten lives and silenced voices. I have come to realize that to find a "home," I need to first create a world in which to belong to. My recent works are investigations of possibilities for another world, a world of compassion, through a critique of our current society. I create as I rediscover the forgotten histories and lives. My work captures my process of remembering and celebrating while simultaneously imagining our capacity to function as philanthropists.

Cette thèse ne traite pas de l'Islam, mais uniquement d'une partie de celui-ci, la frange extrême. Il y a dans ce travail une progression, la vision radicale de l'islam engendre d'abord des victimes, une partie des croyants sont sous une emprise que l'on peut qualifier de sectaire. Ce terme tabou pendant longtemps n'a jamais été associé à l'islam avant le rapport parlementaire sur le port de la burqa. Pourtant, par un raisonnement par analogie, des branches de l'islam fonctionnent comme les sectes dénoncés dans de nombreux rapports parlementaires.Lorsque l'adepte cherche à appliquer les préceptes les plus rigoristes de l'islam, il se trouve parfois en conflit avec les valeurs et le droit français, dont l'origine et les fondements actuels sont totalement différents. Il y aura alors une mutation. L'adepte victime d'une forme sectaire de l'islam va se retrouver auteur de faits pénalement répréhensible, cette situation pouvant l'amener jusqu'à tomber dans l'activisme. Cette frange est numériquement dérisoire, mais elle s'appuie sur un système financier pour fonctionner plus large et difficilement cernable. L'image du rhizome peut s'appliquer à ce financement. En effet, comme ce végétal, le financement de l'activisme puise à plusieurs sources et alimente plusieurs tiges. L'activisme islamiste en France est passé d'un phénomène relativement ancien et importé de l'étranger à une crainte permanente avec des acteurs pouvant être français / This thesis does not deal with Islam, but only a fraction of it, it's extreme fringe. As this work progresses, it highlights that radical Islamism firstly creates victims, and places a part of the believers under an influence that can be defined as sectarian. This term remained taboo for a long time and has never been associated with Islam before the parliamentary report on the wearing of the burqa. Yet, arguing by analogy, one can see that branches of Islam do function just like sects denounced in several parliamentary reports.When a follower tries to apply the most rigorous precepts of Islam, he may enter a conflict with French values and law, who's origin and actual foundations are entirely different. Their takes place a mutation. A follower being the victim of a sectarian form of Islam gets to become the perpetrator of criminal offenses, this situation may further lead him up to fall into activism. This fringe is numerically absurdly low, but is backed in it's functioning by a financial system that is larger and hard to figure out. The rhizome may give a close picture of this financing. As this plant, the financing of activism has several sources and feeds several stems. Islamic activism in France, formerly a relatively ancient phenomenon imported from abroad, is now a permanent fear and could involve French actors

This practice-based research study examines two questions in an effort to determine how the photographer can play a role in the promulgation of environmental activism. Firstly, I ask if certain aesthetic approaches to the documentation of industrial pollution can be regarded as antithetical to the values of environmentalism; in particular, I examine the use of the sublime and the role that beauty plays in documenting scenes of environmental despoliation. In response to this question, I describe the problems associated with establishing a counter-aesthetic position in my artistic practice, which is commensurate with environmental ethics. Secondly, I ask how photography can be used as a means of conducting environmental protest by working in solidarity with environmental scientists and activists, in the struggle for environmental remediation. In a bid to answer this question, I argue that the production and dissemination of the photobook is one method of realising the dissensual capacity of art to bring about the conditions necessary for remediation to occur. Importantly, my practice proceeds through an understanding of debates ongoing in contemporary theory. In particular, I argue that Jacques Rancière s conceptions of dissensus (Rancière, 2010: 173) and the politics of aesthetics (Rancière, 2004: 25) can be interpreted as a means of understanding how aesthetics can be used to enact a form of political praxis. Using Rancière and Murray Bookchin s concept of social ecology as a basis for my artistic practice, I claim that photography can not only make the existent reality of pollution visible, it can also initiate a form of participatory democratic subjectivity, allowing the demands of the artist to become visible too. Moreover, in the design and dissemination of the three photobooks I have created, I make a case for a collaborative model of artistic practice, which extends beyond the medium specificity of photograph, and embraces multimodality and trans-disciplinarity, as a means of situating the photograph into a broader discursive field.

This is an ethnographic study of urban education and community development in the city of New Orleans. In New Orleans, as in all American cities, the public schools are at the center of local politics and the policies that affect community life. Institutions of public education have come under fire for failing to prepare youth to compete in the global economy. This is particularly true in urban communities, where schools serve a higher proportion of students of color facing greater incidences of poverty, underemployment and economic distress. As education policymakers and business leaders look to improve education, many of the solutions put forth to reform schools focus on meeting state standards and instituting high stakes testing. A group of educators, community activists, artists, and young people in New Orleans have taken a different approach. By combining classroom learning with social action, the individual and collective empowerment of students serves as the focus of Students at the Center, a program designed by a writing teacher and his students, that operates within the public school system. Through community-based study on environmental, public health, neighborhood development issues, young people in the Students at the Center program begin to see the learning process, and the product of their education as tools for equitable social change through research, writing, youth media, and social action. This research examines the ways that taking part in community collaborations that emphasize local history, a sense of place, and the struggle for social justice affects students, teachers and residents as they strive to make education accountable to community concerns.

The main objective of this study is to develop a feminist theoretical understanding of menstruation. I first explore Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist existentialist concept of woman as Other to establish a baseline from which all other sociocultural discourses on menstruation flow. I next expand Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionist theory on stigma to discuss the social-psychological internalization process that girls encounter as they become enculturated into menstruation as a stigmatic condition. I then use a macro-discursive, Foucauldian analysis on power and discourse to understand how menstruation has been socially constructed from premodern superstitions, to the rise of modern medicine in the late 19th century. I follow this with a Marxian, macro-materialist understanding of capitalism to discuss how the femcare industry emerged and commodified feminine hygiene products. Finally, I investigate how second and third wave feminists have mobilized to resist patriarchal ideologies which devalue, subordinate, and subjugate menstruating bodies.

Thesis advisor: Charles Derber / This thesis examines the relationship between consumption and politics. It focuses on how ethical consumption can be positioned to be part of political participation. It also pays attention to how it can serve as a pathway for creating a better society in which ethical, individual consumers are mobilized toward the collective activism and the conventional political participation that influences social change in the context of globalization and individualism. To demonstrate this, the study examines the case of a consumer cooperative: iCOOP in South Korea based on data from in-depth interviews with members of iCOOP. The findings show that ethical consumption practices can be understood in the context of life politics. Participants in this study constantly make attempts to readapt their consuming patterns and choose their lifestyles based on a changed consciousness of the self, the world, and the interrelations between both at the individual level. By extension, participants analyzed as political agents of life politics show that they can become more engaged in collective activism and conventional political participation. What makes this mobilization possible is that they were able to be involved in rehearsal phases for citizens' roles at the collective level, and to gain easy access to social issues and a set of political tools in iCOOP. It is significant that iCOOP provides a platform for collecting and maintaining the state of this collectivized consumer power by organizing individually scattered consumers. It is not an `imagined community' for mobilizing scattered consumers, but rather a practical and real community established by consumers themselves in which they try to become aware of interrelations between the self and the world, rearrange their ways of living, and further expand their interests and actions to large-scale social and political issues for making social change. These findings not only support the alternative views of ethical consumption as political participation, these also offer a fresh perspective by showing the process and the mechanism of the connection between consumption and politics. This study ultimately leads to the possibility that ethical consumption can become a vehicle that brings about a meaningful change in both life and conventional politics. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology. / Discipline: TO ADD.