This study departs from Gállok, an area 40 kilometres northwest of the city Jokkmokk, in northern Sweden. This is a place to which local people and Saami reindeer herders have material interests and emotional bonds. The mining company JIMAB wants to prospect for extracting minerals from this area. In the summer of 2013 local people, Saamis and environmental activists gathered in Gállok in order to protest and make resistance against these plans. Activism was made, debate articles were written, demonstrations were organized and information about what was going on in Gállok was shared through social media. The aim of this study is to examine the cultural processes of the anti-mining movement, in particular the happenings in Gállok in summer 2013. How did this anti-mining movement take form? What kind of strategies and methods were used, in order to mobilize participants? This study focuses on the material and bodily aspects of resistance and activism. What kind of material interests lie behind the involvement? How do they use their bodies as tools to make resistance? Furthermore the current thesis examines some of the reasoning, questions and emotions that circulate in the movement. Around which questions and values do the participants in the anti-mining gather? How do emotions affect people's involvement? One of the main arguments of this study is that social movements can be understood both as political and cultural. Is this also the case with the anti-mining movement in Gállok? This study consists of 5 chapters and a summary. The first chapter presents the theories, methods and materials that have been used in this study. In chapter two the reader is presented to the historical background and context of the anti-mining movement. In the third chapter, we examine some of the main reasonings, questions and emotions that circulate in the movement. The fourth chapter focuses on the happenings that took place in Gállok in the summer of 2013, when activists, locals and Saami people where gathered to protest and make resistance. In the fifth chapter a anti-mining demonstration that took place in Jokkmokk in the winter of 2014 is analyzed. The conclusions are then drawn in the final brief summary.

Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009) and the work of LGBTQ activists in the U.S. I argue that the act consolidates the U.S. nation-state’s monopoly on violence by relying on criminal law as a cognitive apparatus and stifles the work of LGBTQ activists and cultural labor to expand or challenge sensibilities regarding violence. I look to the work of trans and queer activists and how they frame “minor” hate crime cases in relationship to space and systems of criminalization. The activism surrounding Sakia Gunn, the New Jersey 7, Chrissy Lee Polis, and CeCe McDonald broaden theoretical account of violence provided by hate crime protections by attending to affect, the body, and space, and make political demands that move beyond criminal law. This thesis attempts to follow those trajectories and provide alternative grammars and methods for addressing violence. / text

Situated in the contemporary debate over the implications of the Internet to the contentious politics and authoritarian states, this study is an empirical investigation into the mechanism and the determinants of cyber-to-physical mobilisation in contemporary China. This research compares the mobilization processes of the two cyber-contentious episodes in China, namely the Xiamen PX Event in 2007 and the Sanlu Milk Scandal in 2008. It is grounded on a two-year cyber-ethnographic investigation and in-depth interviews with 14 people differently involved in the respective cyber-contentious episodes. In order to find out why some contentious activities are able to transform into street protests while others of similar nature are contained or even vanish in the cyberspace, this study examines the interactions between the four stakeholders in each contentious episode (i.e., the cyber-protesters, the media, the state power, and the market forces). It highlights the importance of the state power and the market forces in cyber-to-physical mobilisation, and determines the conditions under which cyber-to-physical mobilisation is feasible. This thesis elucidates how the state power and the market forces collectively condition cyber-to-physical mobilisation through the media (both the print and the digital media). The entire mechanism is powered by the tensions between cyber-protesters, the media, the state power and the market forces. The media framing of an incident influences the grievance formation of cyber-protesters, which further determines cyber-to-physical mobilisation. Thus, by manipulating the media framing, the state power or the market forces may control cyber-to-physical mobilisation, although it is not always a success. Based on the mechanism for cyber-to-physical mobilisation, this thesis further ascertains the conditions for cyber-to-physical mobilisation. The two contentious episodes show that cyber-to-physical mobilisation is prohibited when the respective core interests of the state power and the market forces are in complete unity (i.e., national mobilisation and industrial damage are eminent). On the contrary, if cyber-to-physical mobilisation merely triggers controllable regional mobilisation, the state will tolerate it; and if cyber-tophysical mobilisation only costs limited corporate damage, the market forces will allow it. Under such circumstances, cyber-to-physical mobilisation is possible. / published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation is a critical ethnography about the power that storytelling offers in creating sustainable community literacy programs. The research for this dissertation was conducted at a ten year-old grassroots community literacy organization, VOICES: Community Stories Past and Present, Inc., which is based in Tucson, Arizona. Interviews for this project were conducted over a period of two years and includes feedback from thirty-three board members, staff members, volunteers, and youth participants at the organization. The dissertation begins with the assertion that gaps in understanding between theory and practice lead to damaging assumptions about difference and inequality, especially in the realm of community-based programming. I argue that an expanded understanding of storytelling as reciprocal and transformative can bridge these misunderstandings.In order to bridge the divide between theory and practice, this project offers the concept of reciprocity, fleshed out by the work of Ellen Cushman and Pierre Bourdieu, to encourage both participants in community literacy programs, as well as administrators, to be more transparent about their goals by sharing individual experience. This concept of reciprocity is the foundation on which storytelling as an agent of transformation rests. The process of storytelling that this project proposes establishes advocacy journalism and witnessing as a precedent. In the stories about interviewing and storytelling that the narrators from VOICES share, reciprocity is performative in that it can be manipulated to fit the needs of specific rhetorical situations. But this performance is dependent on the audience. I suggest that contrary to many discussions in composition and rhetoric, the tension between "addressed" and "invoked" audiences is an accurate one, and can be used to generate conversation about the assumptions and expectations of low-income youth and community literacy participants. An addressed audience is necessary in order for stories to be transformative; which is ultimately the way that they create large-scale social change. The conclusion of this project argues that administrators and literacy workers must foster an ethic of sustainability, which can be achieved through storytelling in order to both honor difference and challenge inequality in ways that are meaningful to the participants in these programs.

Foucault's argument in the short work "Of Other Spaces" suggests that rhetoric can be defined as how language is used to create and foster power inequities in hierarchical systems. Further, rhetoric enables individuals or groups to gain credibility and mobility within those systems--and to deny that same credibility and mobility to others. The nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period of transition for women, particularly middle- and upper-class white women. During this time, activist activities conducted by and on behalf of women were considered a threat to U.S. society. As a result, rhetoric was used with the intention of limiting American women's credibility and mobility.Although women had always been considered physiologically and intellectually inferior, diagnoses with a variety of "female-only" ailments became more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For men threatened by women's increasing political activism, this became a very effective method of arguing that women should be denied access to power. Because women were considered outside of the structure of society by virtue of a physiological state they were unable to change, then by definition women could only be regulated, and never regulate. Moreover, the postbellum expansion of civil society into a mass-market structure was an extremely efficient means of distributing that message.In this work, I use Foucault's "science of discipline" as the heuristic to analyze these debates. Foucault lists numerous categories and subcategories that can fall under the science of discipline--far too many to productively and coherently apply here. Therefore, I have modified the science of discipline into a four-pronged process. Applying this heuristic to the definition of rhetoric put forth here, I argue in this work that the medical profession, the magazine industry, and activist women engaged in dialogue with one another within the context of the suffrage movement. I argue that these specialized discourses responded to and built upon ideological allegiances, both explicitly and implicitly, to address the issue of woman's place in society--the "woman question."

In this study I explored the research questions, how do students understand membership in a community and the responsibilities of our various locations and what pedagogical rationales and practices move students from awareness of social injustice towards acting to transform the societal structures that reinforce injustice? This project engaged in a critical and classroom action research using ethnographic tools with a class of Grade 7 students from a Vancouver elementary school. The purpose was to create spaces in curriculum for student initiated social justice oriented actions while testing a pedagogy founded in student inquiry, criticality and praxis. This was an experiment in applying critical discourse to instructional design. While teaching about social justice issues, the teacher- researcher sought to employ the principles of social justice in the pedagogy as well as the methodology of this study. The methodology sought to be consistent with the principles of social justice through attempting to create a collaborative critical research cohort with students through using data collection to foster a dialogic relationship between teacher- researcher and students. The data collection was in the forms of teacher and student generated fieldnotes, a communal research log, photography, questionnaires, interviews and written reflections. The findings from this research were analyzed through the themes of teacher tensions, constructs of student and teachers, and resistance. The analysis of the data provided opportunities for identifying power dynamics within the concepts being critiqued, exploring the makings of the cognitive unconscious and entering into a dialogic relationship with students about official and hidden curricula. Conclusions drawn from this research included that the experiment of teaching and researching for social justice in a socially just manner requires not only a grounding in theory and an awareness of the normative discourse, but an investigation of and critical reflection on those social constructions of teacher and student that are deeply embedded in the collective cognitive unconscious of the classroom. Teacher tensions and student resistance are productive as they provoke awareness of these constructions and their effects on the classroom.

In this thesis I explore and evaluate the grounds upon which we can claim that community and activist art makes a difference in peoples’ lives. To do so, I examine an ongoing art project that seeks to transform the lives of American women with HIV/AIDS through artistic creation, the STITCHES Doll Project. To evaluate the efficacy of the Project, I position the Project in relation to the history of HIV/AIDS in America, popular and medical understandings of the illness, connections between HIV/AIDS and oppressive structures, representations of the illness, as well as Western conceptions of embodiment, illness, and identity. Against this history, I provide visual and textual analyses of several of the works produced through the STITCHES Doll Project, in combination with interviews and reports from participants themselves, to determine how these dolls affect these women’s sense of self and agency. This thesis argues that Western understandings of the meaning of HIV/AIDS, combined with its physical, emotional, social, and psychological effects, violently erodes a sense of self for those who contract the illness. Specifically, I argue that because identity in the West is predicated upon self-control, self-containment, mental control, and a repression of embodiment, illness, and death, HIV/AIDS has been experienced at both a personal and cultural level as corrosive of identity. In response to such pain, the STITCHES Doll Project provides an opportunity for HIV+ women to use a variety of strategies to re-establish their identity. Strategies such as sharing the illness or displacing it, when enacted through the Project, can successfully assist in re-affirming identity for participants. I suggest that this is where the value of the Project is best situated, and that this case study provides reason to believe in the value and power of community and activist art. Nevertheless, the Project’s success at individual, social, political, and pedagogical levels is tempered by the challenges posed by cultural codes, discourses, institutions, and practices. In light of this, my research explores how negotiation of these cultural codes, norms and practices helps to both re-build, as well as un-do, identity for participants. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-29 14:29:09.34

This thesis follows and examines the lives of people in Atlanta, Georgia who own and advocate for the controversial group of dog breeds and mixed breeds known as “pit bulls.” The greater meaning of pit bulls within the United States is also considered from a historical and anthropological lens. This thesis uses pit bulls as a medium to explore issues of race, gender, and stigma in the United States and to consider how pit bull owners and activists use their understanding of the public around them to change ideas surrounding their dogs.

The thesis analyses the relationship between shop-floor militancy and union politics in the period after the birth of "new unionism" in Brazil in the 1980s and addresses the problems and dilemmas faced by this new type of union movement. It is based on a case study of steelworkers at the National Steel Company and their representative union, the Metal workers' Union of Volta Redonda, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The research design has emphasised qualitative methods such as in-depth interviewing and field observation. The researcher has also made use of the computer in the analysis of data, through a new type of computer software which is being introduced in sociological research. The objectives of the thesis are two-fold. First, it offers an in-depth study of the relationship between shop-floor politics and union politics in a steel plant. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of "politics of production" introduced by Michael Burawoy, and on the debate around levels of leadership representation of union members, as inaugurated by Robert Michels. The second objective is to assess the developments of "new unionism" in Brazil, ten years after its birth, and to discuss the extent to which it has actually broken with populist and bureaucratic types of unionism and advanced towards more democratic forms of union politics. With the knowledge available today of national level politics, it is possible to argue that in the course of the 1980s the "new unionist" movement developed a significantly more legitimate and democratic relationship between union leaders and their base, and that this helped to break with the "regulated citizenship" of working-class groups in society by expanding their labour rights, by successfully pressing for changes in the Labour Code and by participating in national level politics. The analysis of the case study suggests that the contribution of the new union movement was especially significant in the politicised use of the CIPA (Internal Committee for the Prevention of Accidents) and in the innovative use of the Labour Courts. The significance of these dimensions was that they involved an attempt to expand workers' rights as well as to create new bases under which the rights were granted. On the other hand, the case study suggests that the internal dynamics of the "new union" movement still have elements which may be characterised as non-democratic, and that this generated a new set of problems and dilemmas for organised labour in Brazil for the 1990s.

The invaluable historical records of human rights non-governmental organizations have contributed to the protection of human rights and important social changes (such as the abolition of slavery in the West) at the local, national, and global levels over the last 200 years. This thesis stresses the importance of these records creators and their records in a case study of two human rights non-governmental organizations that responded to human rights violations in El Salvador in the late twentieth century: Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (San Salvador) and the Resource Center of the Americas (Minneapolis). The other primary and related concern of this thesis is to emphasize the role of the archivist as social justice activist through his or her efforts to include in the archive evidence of marginalized voices that can widen our understanding of peoples' history. As archivists are active shapers of historical memory through archival practice, they must forge alliances with those in the human rights non-governmental sphere to further the contribution of archives to social justice. By actively engaging the world’s memory of the disenfranchised (the archive of justice) archives can play an increasingly important societal role.