In 1967 and 1968, members of the Youth International Party, also known as Yippies, created several mass street demonstrations to protest President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s handling of the United States’ military involvement in the war in Vietnam. The Yippies were a loose network of hippies, anti-war activists, and left-wing radicals committed to cultural and political change. This dissertation investigates how the Yippies used avant-garde theories of theatre and performance in their year of demonstrating against the Johnson administration. The Yippies receive little attention in most histories of American performance, and theatre remains on the margins of political and social histories of the 1960s; therefore this dissertation places performance and political archives side by side to create a new historical narrative of the Yippies and performance. The Yippies created their own networked participatory street performance form by drawing on the political philosophy of the New Left student movement, the organizational strategies of the anti-war movement, and the countercultural values of the hippies. They modified this performance form, which they termed “revolutionary actiontheater,” with performance theories drawn from New York’s avant-garde art world, the concept of guerrilla theatre outlined by R. G. Davis of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the notion of Theater of Cruelty created by Antonin Artaud. Using performance theory and cultural history as primary methodologies, this project traces the Yippies’ adoption of revolutionary action-theater with three examples: the 1967 “March on the Pentagon” where future Yippie leaders performed an exorcism ritual at the Pentagon; the 1968 “Grand Central Station Yip-In” event that advertised for the Yippie movement; and the 1968 “Festival of Life” at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago where the Yippies nominated a pig as presidential candidate. The final chapter on the recent phenomenon of flash mobs argues that the Yippies’ legacy lives on in this participatory street performance form, and suggests that revolutionary action-theater can still serve as a model for political action. / text

Uppsatsens syfte är att undersöka hur elever ser på elevinflytande i praktiken, dvs. var de uppfattar att elevinflytande kommer till uttryck, vilka som agerar i dessa sammanhang, vilka frågor elevinflytandet gäller samt vad elever gör då de upplever att de inte får gehör för sitt inflytandebehov. Dessutom är syftet, mot bakgrund av ovanstående, att utröna om alla elever kan påverka sin skolvardag i samma utsträckning. Uppsatsen bygger på intervjuer med sju kvinnor och sju män, alla elever på tre olika gymnasieskolor. Det är framförallt i ett forum, närmare bestämt den elevorganiserade deltagardemokratin i skolornas korridorer, korridorkulturen, som eleverna är aktiva vad gäller elevinflytandearbete. Där sker diskussioner gällande elevinflytande, planering av agerande, liksom agerande i elevgenererade inflytandefrågor såsom veckoschema och examinationssätt. Andra fora där elevinflytande utövas är de personalorganiserade deltagardemokratiska kurssamråden samt klassråden. Kurssamråden utgörs av samråd mellan lärare och elever vad gäller lektionernas innehåll, arbetssätt samt examinationssätt. Klassråden ger elevinflytande i frågor gällande provschema och den fysiska arbetsmiljön. Den dialogpartner som i de allra flesta fallen nämns är läraren. Rektor och övrig personal upplevs som mycket avlägsna i elevinflytandesammanhang. Detta gäller dock inte för de elever som är representanter i personalorganiserat representativt råd. Dessa upplever tvärtom att de har ett reellt inflytande.

This thesis deals with the sociological conception of the dropout (Aussteiger) figure in Wilhelm Genazino’s Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag (2001) and, in terms of the history of ideas, his predecessors in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1808) and Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1913). It discusses if and how Genazino’s protagonist represents a new contemporary dropout model, and discusses the extent to which such figures can be read as dropouts, how their individual dropout characteristics are designed and motivated, and which factors connect these central characters to each other. According to Christian Schüle and his “21 Fragmente über die Identität des Aussteigers” no one can better provide a picture of the state of a society than someone who intentionally exits from it. Thus, the essential process of dropping out is described. If someone is dropping out, he is reacting to circumstances; to what extent he reacts is, however, uneven. There is no prototype of a dropout. To grasp this highly complex and little investigated phenomenon, several sociological concepts are employed, such as assimilation, deviant behaviour, alienation, individualism and the aspect of self-realization. Niklas Luhmann’s Protest serves as another theoretical basis for the concept of dropping-out (Aussteigertum). His book focuses on how protesters choose themes that none of society’s systems would recognize as their own and thereby mirror the state of things in the society as they really are. The thesis then shows how the action of all three protagonists can be associated with these sociological concepts and how Genazino’s character in Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag is related to previous protagonists such as Kohlhaas and Samsa. Kleist’s “gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt” becomes the alienated world of Gregor Samsa and turns into Genazino’s “Gesamtmerkwürdigkeit des Lebens” in which melancholia and succussion bring the protagonist near to failing. The experimental setting all three authors use brings to mind the philosophical stream of Existentialism, on which they all seem to verge. Under societal pressure, all three figures begin to protest against their related situations in different ways. Because of having to submit himself to the exigencies of the society, Genazino’s protagonist feels as if he has to degenerate. To escape from these feelings he continuously walks physically through his environment and at the same time applies a philosophy of sight: as a reflective observer in the river of everyday life, as a swimmer against the tide of boredom, he drops out of society in his own way, different from the way Kohlhaas and Samsa did, but still related to them.

This thesis examines the production of Tamil youth in the state of Canada as threats, extremists, radicals, terrorists, and as subjects to be engaged in de-politicized humanitarian discourses of reconciliation and peace. By drawing attention to the exclusion of Tamils from rights in legal proceedings, the positioning of youth protesters as harbingers of a multicultural 'crisis,' and the role of education in securing Canada's response to the MV Sun Sea as a 'humanitarian' project, I argue that the targeting Tamils is not only integral to Sri Lanka's ongoing genocide, but is also crucial to the Canadian state's project of white settler colonialism. In examining the law, media and education as sites of racial management in the 'War on Terror' and its globalized counter-terrorism regime I identify the targeting of Tamil diaspora youth as a necessary racial logic for the legitimacy of the Canadian state in an era of official multiculturalism.

My aim in this dissertation is to explore the manner in which protest leaders in the post-apartheid context understand themselves and their actions against the backdrop of the socio-historical, political and economic conditions within which protests take place. The aim is to contribute to the debate around the nature of the challenge posed by protest action to the post-apartheid neoliberal order. The study uses an actor-oriented ethnographic methodology to examine at close range the nature of the protest movement in working class South African townships focusing on the so-called service delivery protests. In the quest to understand the action, forms of organisation and ideologies characteristic of the protests, and their significance for post-apartheid society, I use concepts and insights from the literature on social movements, discourse theory and, in particular, Gramsci's ideas on hegemony. The latter helps me to define and assess the threat posed by the protests to the dominant order which I characterise as neoliberalism or neoliberal capitalism. The conclusion that I come to is that the protests are best understood in the context of the transition from apartheid to democracy: its dynamics and its unmet expectations. They represent a fragmented and inchoate challenge to the post apartheid neoliberal order. Their weakness, I argue, partly derives from the effects of the demobilisation of the working class movement during the transition to democracy. It will take broader societal developments, including the emergence of a particular kind of leadership and organisation, for the protests to pose a serious challenge to the present order. The experience of the struggle against apartheid suggests the necessity of a vision of alternatives to inspire, shape and cohere struggles around everyday issues and concerns into struggles for radical society-wide alternatives. Protest action was linked to imagination of a different way of doing things and organising society. Without this link, it is likely that the protest movement will be increasingly isolated and contained with some of its energy used negatively, for example, in populist chauvinism, xenophobic attacks, mob justice, and other forms of anti-social behavior that are becoming a worrisome feature of post-apartheid society. Nonetheless, it provides hope and the foundation for a different future. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.

This thesis examines the production of Tamil youth in the state of Canada as threats, extremists, radicals, terrorists, and as subjects to be engaged in de-politicized humanitarian discourses of reconciliation and peace. By drawing attention to the exclusion of Tamils from rights in legal proceedings, the positioning of youth protesters as harbingers of a multicultural 'crisis,' and the role of education in securing Canada's response to the MV Sun Sea as a 'humanitarian' project, I argue that the targeting Tamils is not only integral to Sri Lanka's ongoing genocide, but is also crucial to the Canadian state's project of white settler colonialism. In examining the law, media and education as sites of racial management in the 'War on Terror' and its globalized counter-terrorism regime I identify the targeting of Tamil diaspora youth as a necessary racial logic for the legitimacy of the Canadian state in an era of official multiculturalism.

This thesis both draws from and contributes to the ongoing project of critiquing and reconstructing the theory of the public sphere; an undertaking that has been characterised as both valuable and necessary by Fraser (2005: 2) and many others. The subsection of theory variously described as ‘postmodern’, ‘radical’, or ‘agonistic’ informs an intensive practical and theoretical critique of the pre- and post-‘linguistic turn’ iterations of the Habermasian ideal, before culminating in the articulation of a concise and operationalisable ‘neo-Habermasian’ public sphere ideal. This revised model retains the Habermasian public sphere as its core, but expands and sensitizes it, moving away from normative preoccupations with decision-making in order to effectively comprehend issues of power and difference, and to allow publicness “to navigate through wider and wilder territory” (Ryan, 1992: 286). This theoretical framework is then mobilised through a critical discourse analytical approach, exploring three cases of hacktivist counterpublicity, and revealing the emergence of a multivalent, multimodal discourse genre capable of threatening and fracturing hegemony. The case studies are selected using Samuel’s (2004) taxonomy of hacktivism, and explore the ‘political coding’ group, Hacktivismo; the Creative Freedom Foundation and the ‘performative hacktivism’ of their New Zealand Internet Blackout; and the ‘political cracking’ operations carried out by Anonymous in protest against the Australian government’s proposed Internet filter. The analysis focuses on how the discursive form and content of hacktivism combines to function counterhegemonically; that is, how hacktivists work to provoke widespread political preference reflection and fracture the hegemony of the publics they are oriented against. This approach generates a fruitful feedback loop between theory and empirical data, in that it enriches and extends our understanding of new modes of counterpublicity, as well as providing a detailed account of the under-researched yet increasingly widespread phenomenon of hacktivism.

The thesis develops a comprehensive account of human political ontology through the discussion of Plato, Rousseau, Lacan, Lyotard, Hugo, Conrad, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. At the heart of this account lies the dialectical struggle between an individual's need to belong and their fidelity to an intuitively recognisable, yet difficult to define good (or set of goods), that has, over the millennia, been conceptualised as, amongst other things, the form of the good, self interest, compassion, love, friendship, the event, conscience, reason and truth. Through the development of this account of human political ontology the thesis will elucidate the stakes involved in emancipatory acts, be they broad social movements or individual transformations. Its most important argument is that people almost always fail to recognise that to which they belong; the consequence of this being that they mistake the acts which function to reaffirm their belonging for acts that are indicative of their sovereign being. This phenomenon becomes particularly troubling once we recognise that the acts which function to reaffirm an individual??s belonging can depend upon the individual sacrificing both themself and others.

The thesis develops a comprehensive account of human political ontology through the discussion of Plato, Rousseau, Lacan, Lyotard, Hugo, Conrad, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. At the heart of this account lies the dialectical struggle between an individual's need to belong and their fidelity to an intuitively recognisable, yet difficult to define good (or set of goods), that has, over the millennia, been conceptualised as, amongst other things, the form of the good, self interest, compassion, love, friendship, the event, conscience, reason and truth. Through the development of this account of human political ontology the thesis will elucidate the stakes involved in emancipatory acts, be they broad social movements or individual transformations. Its most important argument is that people almost always fail to recognise that to which they belong; the consequence of this being that they mistake the acts which function to reaffirm their belonging for acts that are indicative of their sovereign being. This phenomenon becomes particularly troubling once we recognise that the acts which function to reaffirm an individual??s belonging can depend upon the individual sacrificing both themself and others.