Toward the start of the Palestinian Intifada in 2000, activists formed a media watchdog group called Palestine Media Watch (PMW) to challenge U.S. news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tired of coverage that blamed the conflict on Palestinian terrorism, PMW monitored news coverage, met with newsworkers, and bombarded news organizations with complaints in an attempt to root the conflict’s cause in Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. I study PMW’s efforts to produce change in coverage, and examine its campaigns’ effects. Most critical research examines the news system’s production of “propaganda” and news models suggest that media monitoring is one mechanism through which an entire “ideological air” is supported. “Guardian watchdogs,” like the Israel lobby, guard the ideological boundaries around news content that are erected by others. This study considers PMW’s efforts in terms articulated by the dialogic and dialectical models, which gives agency to dissident movements and requires study of the strategic interactions between media and movements to understand framing struggles. These models suggest that “dissident watchdogs,” like PMW, can affect news coverage. What is not clear is the extent to which dissident watchdogs can affect news content when they can make appeals that resonate with professional journalism but that do not resonate with the country’s ideological air. I examine PMW’s strategies to produce content changes between 2000 and 2004, detail the group’s interactions with newsworkers, and document the outcomes of those interactions to understand the struggle to affect media framing. The watchdog, when it systematically monitored coverage and individually critiqued news staff, produced substantive changes in content and practice but these were limited in number. When the watchdog bombarded news organizations with complaints it was able to produce several superficial changes, but these changes resulted in no meaningful impact on the news frame. These findings indicate that the dominant narrative is incorporative enough to accommodate “journalistically useful” points without resulting in a fundamental or substantive change in the frames that inform newswork. Thus, the emergence of dissident media monitors to “neutralize” guardian monitors is only one step toward affecting the entire “ideological air” that informs newswork of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues. / text

Since the 1990s, genetically modified (GM) agriculture has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Despite the rapid commercialization of GM crops in the United States, global controversy has slowed the adoption of the technology in developing countries. Yet, few studies have examined regulatory disputes outside of the United States and Europe. Debates in the United States and Europe focus on issues of human health and consumer choice. In other parts of the world, particularly Latin America, disputes center on the threats that GM agriculture poses to unique centers of biodiversity and food security, as well as issues related to bio-fuel expansion and the control over genetic resources and knowledge. My dissertation takes research on biotechnology in a new direction by analyzing the political process through which regulatory knowledge related to GM agriculture is negotiated, contested and reformulated. Guatemala is a key case to examine the politics of biotechnology regulation because despite strong US trade and transnational commercial interests, it is still illegal to grow biotech crops. The question becomes: what explains resistance to agricultural biotechnology? To address this issue, my dissertation focuses on three primary themes. First, I examine historical Mayan rural livelihood strategies within a context of political exclusion and state violence during the country's 36-year civil war. This history, in turn, informs a contemporary context characterized by the continued importance of subsistence-based corn production in the face of mounting rural inequality. Second, I contend that biotechnology regulatory debates in Guatemalan state institutions are integrally tied to a unique national context of corn biodiversity. I focus specifically on disputes between US-sponsored biotechnology regulations based on the principles of free trade and a more cautionary United Nations biosafety program. Third, I argue that resistance to agricultural biotechnology is bringing together diverse Guatemalan Mayan organizations until recently divided by the violence of the civil war. These organizations are deploying sophisticated cultural, economic and environmental knowledges that are effectively challenging efforts to commercialize GM agriculture. On a broader level, this study asserts that resistance to agricultural biotechnology is emblematic of broader struggles over the definition of legitimate knowledge in neoliberal development.

This dissertation explores the impact of multiculturalism on the relationship between ethno-racial social movements and the Venezuelan State. It assesses movements´s capacity to achieve recognition and redistribution within a State embracing anti-neoliberal multicultural discourses and policies.I conducted a comparative ethnographic study of two ethno-racial movements in northwestern Venezuela - the Ayamán-turero indigenous organization located in Lara state and the Afrodescendant movement in Yaracuy state. In order to explain the contemporary variations of these movements´s strategic capacities, I proposed the concept of mobilizing habitii - which I defined as the multilayered dispositions, practices, perceptions, and values orienting social mobilization. I argue that the mobilizing habitii of social organizations can be explored by examining their collective actions frames, strategic actions, and habitual practices. Historical evidence suggests that Ayamán mobilizing habitii have been characterized by strategies of avoidance, while Afroyaracuyan mobilizing dispositions have been shaped by their direct engagement with the State.My comparative research also suggests that Afroyaracuyan people from Veroes have managed to engage in successful territorial struggles, involving effective land redistribution. In contrast, Ayamán people have focused their efforts on reproducing State cultural performances and local ritual practices. However access to material resources, still remains limited for this indigenous population, and almost impossible to achieve through ethno-racial forms of mobilization.My comparative endeavor also shows how the Venezuela multicultural project represents a significant rupture with other Latin American neoliberal multicultural projects. Since 2006, the Venezuelan State has been indigenized, by representing indigenous peoples as the "seeds" and "holders" of the socialist project. The State has institutionalized some indigenous organizations by controlling their resources and by politicizing some leaders. Paradoxically, afrodescendant peoples have remained at the legal margins of this process, facing the ideological barriers of the myths of racial democracy and mestizaje.My conclusions suggest, that ethnic recognition in Bolivarian Venezuela ensures limited redistribution of material resources, while it simultaneously re-essentializes ethno-racial categories and produces new subjectivities. In other words, ethno-racial mobilization is limited for achieving substantial material resources, even in States which are implementing anti-neoliberal multicultural policies.

This dissertation examines the work of alternative economies activists who have spent the last 18 years constructing barter systems and local currencies in Medellín, Colombia. Through barter, these activists hope to spark an ethical re-evaluation of production, exchange, and consumption, and to create an economy that serves Medellín's middle-class professionals, rural peasants, urban workers, students and the chronically under-employed. They also see barter as an important social and political project to repair a social fabric torn by decades of violence and economic exploitation. For these activists barter is a counter to capitalism, violence, and social fragmentation; it is a new proposal rooted in cooperation, collective well-being, and the development of local capacities. Previous researchers have thoroughly examined the emergence, organization, and impacts of these types of alternative economies, but they have neglected what many activists consider to be the greatest challenge: to cultivate the new social relations and subjectivities necessary to enact and maintain those models. In the words of Colombia's barter organizers, the goal is to "change the chip" and "clean out the cucarachas" of our capitalist mindsets in order to "create a new culture of solidarity." This research is located at precisely that sticking point. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research, I examine the nature and impacts of barter and the challenges that barter activists face as they try to recreate economies, social relations, and subjectivities. Medellín's barter projects, I conclude, offer extremely important opportunities for cross-class and cross-generational interaction in a city that is violently divided. They also provide material and social supports for traders who are seeking to develop alternative subjectivities, and they help active traders gain control over the means of production and the conditions of their work. However, their counter-hegemonic potential is significantly limited by three tensions within organizers' strategies: a tendency to prioritize socio-cultural forms of activism at the expense of economic ones, a focus on conscious and moral aspects of subjectivity rather than material and embodied aspects, and a stridently anti-capitalist stance that discourages economic articulations and thereby reinforces the material and socio-cultural power of capitalism.

This dissertation examines the ways in which socio-cultural, economic and religious ideologies shape discourses on women’s rights, higher education and empowerment in Ghana. The study starts from the premise that female identity in Ghana is constructed through discourses of reproduction that produce and reproduce unequal gender relations that negatively impact women’s higher socio-economic and educational attainments. Consequently, discourses of women’s rights and empowerment are inextricably linked to normative reproductive labour expectations. Using a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework, I argue that women’s rights and empowerment issues must be located within particular historical, local and global socio-cultural and political discourses in postcolonial societies. Subsequently, this study situates women’s rights concerns within the larger framework of global systemic inequalities that reinforce the local socio-cultural, political and economic disadvantages of women in Ghana. I interviewed women’s rights activists, conducted focus group discussions with male and mostly female participants during an intensive six-month field study. In line with postcolonial feminist epistemologies, I consider participants as knowledgeable subjects in the production of knowledge about their lived realities, by centering their voices and experiences in my analyses. The experiences of research participants (heterogeneous as they are) provide excellent insights into transnational feminisms, gendered postcolonial landscapes, and global cultural patriarchal hegemonies. These experiences also illustrate how global discourses of rights provide leverage to simultaneously challenge and politicize colonial discourses of race and gender in the global south. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-02-08 16:23:06.155

The purpose of this thesis is to explore and analyze the threat posed by certain social movements during the post-Mao reform era and the various methods of social control used by the Chinese government to deal with them. The thesis will use historical data and three case studies to examine the influence and popularity of social movements and methods of control, from surveillance to physical intimidation to imprisonment and forced exile. The thesis will also explore the evolution of social control over the decades of social change in China. What characteristics of a social movement threaten the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Does the CCP have a preferred method of social control, and has that method withstood the test of time? Does the increasing number of protests signify that China is losing control over its population? What does the future hold?

Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy-engaged, well-resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS-related organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.

This thesis is concerned with the identification, description, analysis and evaluation of the rhetorical strategies and tactics of the Black Panther Party as a specific social-change movement from 1966 to 1973. Evidence is presented to indicate that the rhetorical strategies and tactics of the Black Panther Party played a vital role in the movement's rise and decline and that their choice of a power orientation and a rhetoric of coercion brought about the decline of the movement. This study also indicates that rhetoric in a social movement is of crucial importance to the development of the movement's ideology, leadership, membership, and methods for effecting change.

An individual's initial acceptance of a recruitment pitch from a community-based social movement organization is usually based upon minimal information about the group and its efforts. It is only during the subsequent period of orientation that new members begin to learn more about the organization. During this period, the retention of new members is dependent on the successful alignment of individual and organizational frames. The failure to achieve such an alignment is likely to result in the new member's departure from the organization. This study explores the frame alignment process during early orientation to community-based SMOs. Using nineteen qualitative interviews with three different community organizing efforts in Baltimore, the study suggests that organizational members feel most motivated to continue involvement when they feel that the organization is effective.

This thesis examines the history of urban squatting in East and West Berlin from c. 1970 to c.1990. In doing so, it explores the relationship between urban space, opposition and conformity, mainstream and alternative cultures, as well as questions of identity and belonging in both halves of the formerly divided city. During Berlin’s history of division, illegal squatting was undertaken by a diverse range of actors from across the period’s political and Cold War divides. The practice emerged in both East and West Berlin during the early 1970s, continuing and intensifying during the following decade, before the traditions of squatting on both sides of the Berlin Wall converged in 1989-­‐90, as the city’s – and Germany’s – physical division was overcome. Squatting, this thesis argues, provides an important yet little studied chapter in Berlin’s – and indeed Germany’s – post-­‐war history. What is more, it provides an example of the ways in which, during the period of Cold War division, Berlin’s and Germany’s symbolic meaning was not only contested between East and West, but was, within the respective societies, also re-­‐interpreted from below. Drawing on a broad range of archival sources, this thesis compares and contrasts the experience of squatters on both sides of the Berlin Wall, and the ways in which the respective polities responded to this phenomenon. Broadly similar paradigms of urban renewal, this thesis argues, account for not only parallels in the temporality but also the geography of squatting in East and West Berlin. In both Berlins, this thesis demonstrates, the history of squatting was interconnected with that of domestic opposition and political dissidence. Moreover, squatting contributed to the emergence of alternative urban lifestyles, which sustained comparable urban sub-­‐cultures on both sides of the Cold War divide. Perhaps counter-­‐intuitively, this thesis argues that, East Germany’s apparatus of control notwithstanding, the relationship between squatters and the authorities in the GDR was generally more consensual than it was between their counterparts in West Germany and West Berlin. The thesis not only points to the limits of the totalitarian model of interpretation when applied to late Socialist society in the GDR, but also questions the dominant historiographical trend of studying the two Germanys in isolation from one another. Taking its cue from a number of influential scholars, this thesis asserts the importance of incorporating the experiences of both East and West Germany into a narrative of the nation’s divided past. Through identifying and analysing the overarching variable of urban squatting, this thesis attempts to develops a perspective that regards the post-­‐war history of East and West Germany as part of a wider whole.