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The humankind uses more of earth’s resources than the planet’s ability to provide renewable resources (WWF 2016). This trend is also contributing to climate changes, which have been a topic on the global political agenda for decades. However, there has yet to be found a sustainable solution. People are becoming impatient of the politicians’ ability to solve the issue and through grassroot movements and activism a range of different approaches have been made to find solutions to climate changes. Social media provides new opportunities to organize large groups of loosely connected people of interest towards a common goal, in this case to take care of the planet. Social media have also developed new forms of political engagement. This thesis is a case study of climate change activism through the zero waste community in Denmark that based on framing theory (Goffman 1974), online observations of local Facebook groups and Instagram activity as well as in-depth interviews pursues to understand in what ways participants use social media to make their everyday climate activism meaningful. In this thesis, Bakardjieva (2009, 2012) concepts of subactivism and mundane citizenship combined with framing theory are used to understand the ways mundane climate change actions are perceived meaningful for the participants in the Danish zero waste community. The study shows examples of how participants of the zero waste community in Denmark use social media in a variety of ways to make their mundane climate activism meaningful for them. They use social media to be inspired, share experiences and feel part of a community that emphasize climate change activism through mundane every day routines. Through online discussions in Facebook groups and on Instagram the participants create, challenge and negotiate a collective action frame of the zero waste movement, which proves useful in motivating and inspiring them to continue to do small acts in their everyday life.

<p>The dissertation examines the evolution of global activism and collective identities for three small non-governmental organizations: the Grand Council of the Crees, the Saami Council, and Medecins Sans Frontieres-Canada. The three organizations are considered over a period of fifteen years, from 1990 to 2005. Global activism is an aspect of globalization that can take many different forms, as the three cases show. The study looks at the objectives pursued through global activism and the arguments used by the organizations, the alliances they create and the publics they target to achieve their objectives. From well-organized campaigns to sporadic interventions in global forums, the diversity in the forms of global activism demonstrates the creativity of the organizations and the different issues for which global activism is considered useful. Small groups can participate in the debates surrounding globalization, and sometimes create the spaces in which these debates can take place.</p> <p>The identity at the core of each organization has changed over the period studied. By looking at the self-definition of the organization, its actual roles and power, its leadership, and its relationships with its membership or the people it represents, one can understand better this evolution and how it is related to the global activism carried out by each organization. There are connections between these changes in identities and activism, and the comparative analysis presented in the dissertation illustrates how taking part in globalization can change an organization and allow it to reach its objectives.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

For young people of African descent in Argentina, their belonging and claim to the nation are largely negated by public denial of their existence. While the concept of mestizaje, or cultural and ethnic mixing, was prominent in the nation-building projects of many other Latin American countries (Sutton 2008), Argentina remains profoundly shaped, both demographically and ideologically, by nineteenth-century “blanqueamiento” policies aimed at “whitening” the nation by encouraging European immigration and obscuring its Afrodescendant and indigenous populations (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003). In the last decade, however, transnational Afrodescendant social movements and Argentina’s adoption of multicultural policies and rhetoric (Rahier 2012; Geler 2016) have fueled local activism and led to hard-earned achievements for Argentina’s Afrodescendant communities, such as the addition of an “afrodescendiente” category in the census of 2010. Within this context of shifting national policies and racial ideologies in contemporary Argentina my dissertation examines Afrodescendant young people’s civic-identity formation across institutional and community-based educational environments, where youth are emerging as key interlocutors in the relationship between the state and their diasporic communities. As students, Afrodescendant youth spend much of their time within Argentine educational institutions—institutions founded with the explicit mission of cultivating a “civilized” citizenry within a culturally and ethnically homogeneous nation (Ocoró Loango 2016). In 2005, the Argentine state promulgated a “Plan nacional contra la discriminación” (National Plan against Discrimination) that denounced the predominance of ethnic nationalism in education, but this has led to few institutional changes. Classrooms remain principal sites where Afrodescendant youth encounter various forms of racialization and exclusion, from peer bullying to Eurocentric history textbooks (INADI 2015). Meanwhile, outside the classroom, growing Afrodescendant social movements have opened up new spaces for youth to develop critical consciousness and advocate for their cultural belonging and political rights. I draw on a year of observations, interviews, and youth participatory action research (YPAR) with an Afrodescendant youth organization in Buenos Aires to illustrate how diasporic community-based activism provides Afrodescendant youth with a type of counter-classroom—a space for an alternative civic education that enables them to “imagine their social belonging and exercise their participation as democratic citizens” (Levinson 2005). While formal educational environments are imbued with racializing practices and national narratives that circumscribe citizenship in ways that place Afrodescendants outside the nation, young Afrodescendants are learning to craft broader definitions of Argentine citizenship through counter-storytelling (Solórzano and Yosso 2002) and praxis-based learning (Freire 1970; Ginwright and Cammarota 2007) in their diasporic community. Ultimately, this dissertation traces, contrasts, and connects the diverse educational experiences of Afrodescendant youth, both within their schools and in their diasporic communities, in order to provide a nuanced examination of how these young people are engaged in what Ong (1996) has called the “dual process of self-making and being made” as citizens. / Anthropology

This article is about the alternative forms of power emerging in contemporary activism. It conceptualizes this new form of power as ‘non-dominating’, and puts forward six propositions which characterize this form of power. It builds on work about power with eight diverse communities in the North of England, to argue that this form of power does exist in practice at the neighbourhood level, even though it is not articulated as such. While neighbourhood activists have difficulty in making this form of power effective, at the level of the ‘square’ and global activism, new understandings and practices of power are under conscious experimentation. This contribution therefore suggests that better connections need to be built between these levels of activism. At the same time, non-dominating power should be recognized as enhancing the debate about effective and transformative change and how it can avoid reproducing dominating power.

This research studied the efficacy of enhancing information-based appeals with social influence strategies in order to encourage environmental activism and efficiency behaviors in response to global warming. A secondary goal was to study the relationship between pro-environment attitudes as measured by the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) and the activism/efficiency behaviors. After hearing a 15-minute presentation about the threat of global warming, 270 participants were encouraged to take relevant action by (a) signing web-based petitions asking automakers to build more environmentally friendly cars, (b) sending web-based letters to their state senators asking them to pass legislation to curb global warming, and (c) replacing their own inefficient incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The primary independent variable was the intervention technique used to encourage the three behaviors. The Information Only condition received a standard informational presentation, and a Social Influence condition received a presentation enhanced by the social psychological principles of authority, social validation, and consistency. A third group—Social Influence and Commitment—received the social influence manipulations and also signed a commitment statement. Overall compliance was relatively low, with 30.7% of participants across all conditions completing one or more activism/efficiency behavior. Statistical comparisons of the compliance rates of the three groups were insignificant, and thus failed to support the efficacy of the social influence approach. Participants who held stronger pro-environment attitudes were more likely to complete the tasks. Those who completed at least one of the environmental actions scored significantly higher on a pre-presentation NEP (m = 54.9) than those who completed none (m = 50.3). In addition, political conservatism was negatively related to the NEP and task compliance. Finally, individuals who completed at least one of the requested behaviors showed a significant increase in pro-environment attitude on a second (post intervention) NEP, while the NEP scores of non-compliers remained unchanged. / Ph. D.

yes / This paper provides an overview of the literature on AIDS activism, stigma, and violence. The literature on AIDS activism, stigma and violence discussed suggests that the physical, emotional and social violence that AIDS as a disease, and stigma as a social construct tied to that disease, can be turned into an empowering experience that joins HIV positive people in productive and constructive networks, that this empowerment fundamentally changes one¿s identity, and that such disease-based identities are reshaping notions of citizenship around the globe. This hypothesis is built, however, on theory and on experiences in a) richer countries with a completely different epidemiology than that of sub-Saharan Africa, b) a highly politicised and activist country such as South Africa, and on c) initial ethnographic evidence from West African countries. Although this seems enough evidence to tentatively observe a trend, we need far more evidence from diverse contexts if this transformative potential is to be explored to the full. The paper concludes by drawing out a research agenda.

This research takes elements of the scholarship on environmentalism -- political theory and ethical philosophy -- and evaluates them together in the context of the conflict over salvage logging in the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon. I tell the story of the conflict through a history of land and fire management in the U.S. Through a closely detailed account of the anti-salvage logging activism, I explore the gap between ethics and political responsibility and how they unfold in this battle against deforestation. This research offers an in-depth look into how the environmental movement struggled internally to identify goals, and to challenge powerful economic and political systems that prevent significant change from taking root. I argue that the environmental movement needs a theory of environmental responsibility as a framework by which to better understand the strategies and complexities of environmental conflicts. The task of environmental responsibility is to confront the challenge of how to make the environmental movement responsive to the political and economic conditions that produce conflicts, and how environmentalism can overcome the limits of liberal individualism. As forests continue to dwindle, and as activists across the nation mobilize to stop the Keystone XL pipeline that will carry Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, the future of environmentalism has never been more critical. / Ph. D.