This project is important to the research in both the fields of social movement and of social media and their growing relationship.  This report has analyzed the responses of several key role players in one of the biggest social movements in American history, Occupy Wall Street.  Social media was used as a tool for both communication and information gathering amongst all those who were involved in the movement in a variety of capacities.  The relationship and change that is occurring between traditional media and social media as information sources is also examined.  Through qualitative analysis the importance that the role that social media now commands in our society in the context of social movements specifically became clear.  The results will show the significance of this work and its importance in understanding the role that social media will continue to play in future social movements in the digitized public sphere of the 21st century. / Article manuscript 7,5 hp par of degree:<em> ‘Social media is our media’: two individual activists’ perspectives oftheir relationship with the uses of traditional and social media duringOccupy Wall Street</em>

Magister Artium - MA / The collection of ten short stories, Of Flowers and Tears, aims to capture the events that have shaped my life, impacted on my community. It hopefully gives a voice to topics such as mental trauma, sibling strife, abortion, drug use and abuse, suicide, as well as political and social activism. Whilst none of the topics are new, the collection could potentially add to a growing genre of short story fiction by local authors which examine issues relating to trauma, loss, violence and the acknowledgement of identities. As South Africans, we carry many metaphoric scars (including psychological, socio-economic, sexual) as well as literal ones, which act as testimonies to our violent and frequently traumatic past and present. Even though most of the material used in my collection forms part of my personal memory bank and will be interpreted in a wholly fictional way, I propose that such a collection speaks to pertinent, present and pervasive realities.

Uppsatsen tittar på hur förhållandet mellan akademisk - och tillämpad antropologi ser ut i en biståndskontext. Med hjälp av en antropologs personliga berättelse belyser den biståndsproblematiken på Haiti, där ett flertal olika intressen finns i frågan hur biståndet ska användas för att fungera på bästa sätt. Antropologens olika roller på fältet diskuteras då i frågan hurvida antropologi är ett ämne som aktivt ska vara med på fältet eller ta avstånd från detta. Activist Research-metoden diskuteras som en form av en fusion mellan akademisk - och tillämpad antropologi.

Applied ethnomusicology emerged as a sub-discipline within the larger field of ethnomusicology in the late 1980s. The approach has gained considerable attention in recent years, evidenced by the publication of the first book-length treatment of the subject in 2010 and numerous scholarly papers and roundtables devoted to the topic at the 2011 SEM conference. I review of the literature in order to trace general trends and shifts in frame and approach in order to establish a context for critically reflecting on the role of activist scholarship in ethnomusicology today. Drawing from the literature on applied ethnomusicology, cultural rights projects in Brazil, and personal experiences working with black women hip-hop activists in Recife, I suggest that activist approaches allow greater possibilities for progressive social change, facilitating dialogue and critical reflection in ways that applied approaches do not. I propose that we must re-think activist scholarship in ethnomusicology, and in Brazil more specifically, seriously considering the possibilities and limitations of music making for establishing sustained community activism that incorporates dialogic pedagogy. / text

Some art educators working in communities exemplify an alternative to the more common and stereotypical notion of the artist as autonomous, self-focused, and neutral. They view art-making and education as vehicles for social justice, and in some cases for social and political activism. In these broader social functions, the boundaries between art, education and activism fade. Drawing on perspectives from community art education, sociology, art criticism, critical pedagogy, and social justice education, and based on in-depth interviews with participants, this study examines the motivations, perspectives, development, and experiences of five artist/educator/activists who work in community-based settings in Tucson, Arizona. Common characteristics, as well as questions and implications for further research, are presented and discussed.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2009. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 48-02, page: .

Magister Artium - MA / This mini-thesis draws on the biographical materials of activists; Zubeida Jaffer, Nokuthula Simelane and Siphiwo Mthimkulu in order to investigate their representation as South African Anti-Apartheid activists. Within Post-Apartheid South Africa there seems to be a strong tendency to focus on the spectacular violence that occurred between the National Party government and Apartheid activists. This almost singular focus has led to an overwhelming promotion of the heroic narrative and as a result the structural violence of daily life under apartheid has been side-lined

La thèse s'attache à rendre compte des conditions pratiques et symboliques d'appropriation par les étudiants grévistes de la seconde moitié des années 2000 en France d'une forme d'organisation, l'assemblée générale (AG), qui fait partie de leur répertoire contestataire depuis les années 1960. Il s'agit ainsi de comprendre comment des formes d'action se reproduisent d'une mobilisation à l'autre, c'est-à-dire comment des acteurs en viennent à avoir recours à l'une plutôt qu'à d'autres qu'ils connaissent, comment ils en font l'apprentissage et comment ils la transforment à la marge en la pratiquant. Elle s'appuie principalement sur une enquête ethnographique menée sur les mobilisations qu'ont connu trois sites universitaires entre 2006 et 2010. Les usages des AG sont façonnés par les luttes internes aux groupes sociaux, politiques et syndicaux impliqués dans l'espace de ces mobilisations, de sorte que leur succès tient à la fois à une entreprise symbolique de justification de ces dernières au nom de la « démocratie » par des courants minoritaires, et à leur plasticité. Elles sont en effet investies de toute une palette de rôles – qui n'ont parfois rien à voir avec des normes « démocratiques ». Elles sont ainsi promues par des militants auxquelles elles permettent d'avoir le sentiment de peser sur une masse d'étudiants, et cela d'autant plus qu'ils appartiennent à de petites organisations qui sont loin de pouvoir mobiliser autant d'adhérents. / This dissertation illuminates the practical and symbolic conditions of appropriation of general assemblies (assemblées générales – AG) by striking students in the second half of the 2000s in France. This mode of organization has been part of their contentious repertoire since the 1960s. It tries to understand the recurrence of ways of action from a mobilization to another, that is, how actors come to resort to one of them instead of others they know, how they learn how to practice it and how they slightly transform it in the process. It is mostly based on an ethnographic investigation about the mobilizations of three higher education sites between 2006 and 2010. The uses of AG are shaped by internal conflicts among the social, political and union groups which are involved in the space of these mobilizations, so that their success stems from both the symbolic entreprise of justification of them in the sake of « democracy » by minority currents, and their plasticity. Indeed, they play a whole set of roles – which sometimes have nothing to do with « democratic » norms. They are promoted by activists to whom they give the feeling that they influence a mass of students, especially as they belong to organizations which are far from being able to mobilize as many members.

This person-centered ethnography focused on the ways one exemplary veteran Mexican American bilingual educator’s (MABE’s) cultural resources and professional experiences influenced her teaching practices. The study examined her life history and classroom practices to explore the trajectory of her identity making. The framework utilized in this research included a sociohistorical/sociocultural lens and Chicana/Latina feminist theories. Specifically, my research investigated the multiple spaces where a MABE navigated between an additive bilingual education model and a subtractive one. The study relied primarily on data collected from oral life history interviews augmented by participant observations at a school in a large, central Texas district. The participant, a first grade teacher with 28 years of classroom experience in the same district, was interviewed over a four-year span. Further, classroom observations occurred during a full school year. Additional interviews with educators who worked with the participant at critical moments in her professional life provided not only triangulation of information, but also a multiplicity of perspectives and foci on the educational landscapes wherein she operated. Narrative analysis of the data involved the decoding and deconstruction of a MABE’s active participation in the processes of performing and (re)presenting her identity production including being silenced and speaking up. The findings revealed a dialectic and dialogic process between personal experiences, early schooling, impositions of policies, and daily-lived classroom experience while constantly navigating and negotiating the challenges of educating culturally and linguistically diverse students. A primary finding revealed the construct of autobiographical consciousness as a MABE’s critical awareness of the historical legacy, lived experiences, and the contexts in which she teaches. The study documented silencing through marginalization, as well as establishing voice through agency to understand construction and reconstruction of identities. / text

In this dissertation, I investigate whether corporate governance affects the negative association between investment and future excess returns. Shareholders are concerned with the effectiveness of the firm's governance regime as a tool to reduce agency costs. In the absence of strong control over firm assets, managers may choose to invest in value-decreasing projects. The probability that managers select value-decreasing projects is an increasing (decreasing) function in investment activity (governance regime). At the time of investment, the capital market prices expected returns to the investment activity conditioned on the governance regime in place. This study examines future risk-adjusted returns to investment activities conditioned on low and high governance regimes. If the market correctly prices the governance environment and the expected returns to expenditures at time t, there should be no future risk-adjusted returns to either governance or expenditure information. I find that for firms with low external monitoring, and separately, for firms with high shareholder rights, lower (higher) investment activity results in positive (negative) future risk-adjusted returns. Implementing a trading strategy which holds low investment firms and shorts high investment firms results in 7.1% and 5.6% annual risk-adjusted returns when conditioned on low institutional holdings and high shareholder right, respectively. This study also provides preliminary evidence that outside blockholder and activist ownership is effective in mitigating the negative association between investment activity and future excess returns through the shareholder rights mechanism. Finally, I provide evidence that the diversification discount associated with multi-segment firms is generally invariant to investment activity levels.