This historical study examined the educative processes and development of knowledge in the social movement of the United Farm Workers from 1962 to 1970. Materials for this study were found in the archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University and from secondary sources. A conceptual framework for this study was built upon the theories and positions of those from adult education, educational history, and sociology. This study found that adult learning outside of formal, institutional education can be empowering and life changing as well as providing valuable skills. The learning that occurred in Cesar Chavez's adult life strongly influenced him to leave the migrant stream and establish a community union and social movement. Likewise, the educative processes within the United Farm Workers (UFW) were empowering and prompted farm workers collectively to takes risks to challenge the status quo in their quest for social change. In addition to empowerment, this study determined that the UFW provided numerous educational opportunities for its members to enhance their work, writing, speaking, leadership, and organizational skills. This study determined that Chavez's role in the UFW was inherently educative and that the UFW generated knowledge to society that affected social change. As the movement intellectual, Chavez defined the identity and interests of the social movement to society. Chavez's message was clear. La Causa Para La Raza sought dignity and economic and social justice for the farm workers. The purpose of la causa was for farm workers to gain greater control over their lives and to become more active participants in a democratic society. In 1970, for the first time in the history of farm labor, the UFW succeeded in gaining union contracts from twenty-six major growers in California. Social and economic justice had been won. Conclusions drawn from the study indicate that as a social movement during the period between 1962 and 1970 the UFW offered unique and diverse educational opportunities and experiences for Mexican American farm workers that would not have been possible in institutional education. The UFW demonstrated the diversity and power of educative processes in a social movement for those alienated from formal education. In the tradition of Dewey, Lindeman, and Freire, the UFW represented education for social change. / Ed. D.

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This study is an examination of mobilization processes, with a particular focus on how people come to contemplate and ultimately embrace or reject veganism. It is a response to social movements scholarship that has called for examinations of how identity interacts with mobilization. Engaging the narratives of 34 interview participants who interacted with vegan advocacy networks in Greater Philadelphia, the study accounts for how prospective vegans negotiate forces, such as social networks and ties, that activate or hinder their mobilization; and for how they prioritize veganism amid competing priorities. Among other manners, participants came to contemplate the prospect of becoming vegan upon recognizing veganism as congruent with their other priorities. Participants who became vegan were more likely than participants who did not to prioritize altruism and to seek information that motivated and empowered them. Rather than prioritize their veganism over competing priorities, the vegans more often sought to harmonize their veganism with competing priorities. The study also measures the capacity of people from socioeconomically and racially contrasting neighborhoods in Philadelphia to engage in a behavior and a movement such as veganism. Results from a sample of 335 survey participants suggest that people from impoverished neighborhoods may be less capable because they are less likely to know people who practice veganism. The study's findings suggest that participation in movements is contingent on how prospective participants prioritize, on the incentives with which they contemplate participation, and on their capacity to participate. / Sociology

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The Iranian Revolution of 1979 received considerable attention from modern social scientists who study collective action and revolution because it allowed them to apply their different perspectives to an ongoing social event. Likewise, this work used the Iranian experience as an exemplar, focusing on a sequence of related social movement frames that were negotiated by Iranian groups from the late 19th through the 20th century. Snow and Benford (1992) have proposed that cycles of protest are associated with the development of a movement master frame. This frame is a broad collective orientation that enables people to interpret an event in a more or less uniform manner. This study investigated how movement groups in Iran developed master frames of mobilization during periodic cycles of protests from 1890 to the present. By investigating how master frames were negotiated by social movement actors over time, this work examined both the continuity and change of movement messages during periods of heightened social protest in Iran. / Ph. D.

"We started the 2011 revolution and the rest of Egypt followed," say Egyptian workers with strong conviction. Egyptian independent workers' continuous claims of contention and repertoires of protest were one of several main factors leading to the January 25, 2011 uprising. After thirty-two years of a Mubarak-led authoritarian regime, massive protests began in January 2011 and forced President Mubarak to step down from his position. The first question of this research endeavor is: how did Egyptian workers challenge the regime and how they became one of the factors leading to the January 2011 uprising? These workers were organized into loose networks of different independent groups that had been protesting for a decade and longer prior to January 2011. However, their regular protests for over a decade before 2011 challenged the authoritarian regime. This dissertation examines the combative role of Egyptian independent workers' formal and informal organizations as a contentious social movement to challenge the regime. It will examine the evolving role of workers as socio-economic actors and then as political actors in political transitions. Social Movement Theory (SMT) and its mechanisms and Social Movement Unionism (SMU) will be the lenses through which this research will be presented. The methodology will be the comparative case studies of two different movements where workers who advocated for their rights for a decade prior to January 2011 experienced significantly differing outcomes. One case study showcases the municipal real estate tax collection workers who were able to establish a successful social movement and then create an independent trade union. The second case study examines an influential group of garment and textile workers, who also developed an effective social movement, yet were not able to take it to the next step to establish an independent union. I will explore within this research a second question: why one group of workers was able to establish an independent union while the other arguably more influential group of workers, the garment and textile workers, was not able to do so. This had an impact on the influence they were able to exercise over the regime in addition to their effectiveness as a social movement for change. / Ph. D.

No / The rise of networked social movements contesting neo-liberal globalization and protesting the summits of global finance and governance organizations has posed an analytical challenge to social movement theorists and called into question the applicability to this global milieu of the familiar concepts and heuristics utilized in social movement studies. In this article, we argue that the self-defining alter-globalization movement(s) might instead be engaged with as an expression and effect of global complexity, and we draw upon a `minor¿ literature in social movement studies that includes Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Alberto Melucci to illustrate our claims. This article uses a Deleuzian reading of complexity to describe the phase space of the `movement of movements¿, and its perturbation of global civil society through the iteration of sense-making processes (reflexive framing) and the exploration of singularities inhering in social movement `plateaux¿. Those transnational gatherings, protests and social forums facilitated by computer-mediated communications and the advent of unprecedented mobility which constitute a `shadow realm¿ that remains largely invisible to political exchange theories operating within the conceptual confines of the nation-state.

The purpose of this thesis is to take the individual on a journey about what it is like to be engaged in radical anti-systemic activism in the 21st Century.  Along this journey the reader will learn about the experiences of what it was like to join the Occupy movement"an anti-systemic movement that began in 2011"through an empirical analysis of learning about and practicing the anarchist(ic) characteristics of the movement"horizontal, non-hegemonic, affinity and consensus-based ways-of-being as a part of your everyday lifeworld.  This journey is not only informed by my own personal experience joining the Occupy movement, but it is also informed by my simultaneous experience of maintaining the role of a radical activist-scholar throughout the process.  Accordingly, I will explore how this impacted my lifeworld both within and outside of academia, which informed the very framework, analysis, and outcomes produced in this thesis.  This project was thus also designed to inform social science research"particularly that on social movements"by reflecting on both social roles experienced in this journey in order to cohesively make sense of the paradoxes created by engaging in discourses about, within, and for the Occupy movement.  Of most importance, from an empirical and ontological experience as an Occupier and activist-scholar, this project will help to raise key questions about the frameworks to seek social justice utilized by contemporary anti-systemic social movements in the 21st Century"social movements that are now spreading around the globe. / Master of Science