Browsing by Subject "Social movements"

The US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue.

This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.

Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.

This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.

This dissertation examines the political determinants of government spending across different levels of education. What are the political motivations that drive budgetary decisions on primary, secondary, and tertiary education? Who are the beneficiaries of these appropriations? Why are they capable of influencing the decisions over appropriations?

I argue that the distribution of education spending across education levels depends on the capacity of organized groups active in this sector to make their demands heard and served by governments. Better organized groups have stronger capacity to take advantage of the electoral concerns of politicians and influence their decisions on educational budgets. I provide evidence to show that, with some exceptions, the teachers' unions in the primary and secondary schools are the most influential organized group in the education sector. By taking their demands out to the streets, by capturing key positions in the education ministries, and by using their mobilization capacity in the electoral arena, teachers have made governments cater to their economic interests, rather than direct resources in ways that would enhance access to and the quality of education.

I test the theoretical arguments using an original dataset incorporating a comprehensive account of all protests, strikes, and other disruptive actions by teachers, university workers, students, and parents in Mexico between 1992 and 2008. The statistical analysis reveals that 1) states with higher levels of teachers' protests receive larger federal education grants, and that 2) subnational authorities spend more on primary and lower secondary as a consequence of the larger disruptive behavior observed in these education levels. Complementary qualitative evidence shows how the teachers' union has captured the education ministries at the federal and the subnational levels, consolidating its influence over education policy. Finally, this study reveals the teachers' union capacity to leverage their participation in electoral politics in order to defend its economic interests.

The poor and overwhelmingly non-white Baixada Fluminense, on Rio’s urban periphery, saw Black Catholic priests and lay people engage in religiously-informed activism and grassroots educational initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus began the nationwide campaign that, by 2012, led to the adoption of racial and ethnic quotas in higher education admissions, the civil service, the diplomatic corps, and the military. As part of raising Black consciousness, they drew on a global theology of inculturation and joined others in pioneering a reform of the Catholic liturgy through “Afro Masses” that taught Catholics to respect Africa, its cultures, and its descendants. In doing so, these Catholic activists made common cause with ‘secular’ organizations ranging from trade unions, black movements, NGOs, and political parties that were often formed and led by Catholics. This dissertation suggests that post-Second Vatican Council Catholicism, especially threads that combined Latin American liberation and decolonial African and Asian theologies, is essential if we are to understand how Brazil came to adopt a bold quota system despite the vast under-representation of Blacks and the poor in the political system. Rather spouting class-only Marxism, liberation theology in its Brazilian heartland was a journey in pursuit of personal, spiritual, and collective liberation that contributed decisively to the country’s secular but nonetheless Catholic-informed legal and political culture in the 21st century.

Why, this dissertation asks, did the same Mexican American groups who in the 1950s warned about a “wetback invasion,” come, in the span of only two decades, to take up the cause of the undocumented—even to see themselves and undocumented immigrants as “one people without borders”? And why did this shift occur at a time of economic recession and restructuring, when the significance of unsanctioned migration was most pressing for Mexican Americans?

This project argues that the dreaded “invasion” of undocumented immigrants was the very force that ultimately produced a vibrant Mexican American-led immigrants’ rights movement. It shows that from the late 1960s to the mid-2000s, U.S.-born Mexican American activists came to understand immigration policy and debates as central to their own struggle for both civil rights and human rights.

As they did so, these activists came to fight on various fronts and to use numerous strategies. They took direct action. They built antiracist networks. They fostered alliances with (and articulated the importance of) transnational, working-class labor movements. They developed self-help organizations. They waged legal battles locally and nationally. And they engaged human rights discourses learned from other global struggles.

Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing over the next several decades, these organizers and advocates were able to convince ethnic leaders, labor unions, and allies on the left that supporting immigrants was, in the long run, in the interest of all marginalized people and all workers. Indeed, the immigrants’ rights movement as it exists today is the product of that half-century of transformation.

As it traces that transformation and the understudied roots of the modern immigrants’ rights movement, the dissertation also makes broader contributions to our understanding of the historical significance of immigration in the twentieth-century United States. Blending various methodological approaches—including archival research, oral history, and policy analysis—it shows that debates about immigration have sparked fierce intra-ethnic debates, destabilized traditional political ideologies and coalitions, and revealed fundamental paradoxes of American social and political life.

Namely, this work highlights how tensions between cultural anxieties and capital’s insatiable hunger for cheap labor resulted in both mass migration of indispensable but unwanted foreign workers and Draconian restrictionism and a resurgent nativism, and how this problem, in turn, forced Mexican Americans, organized labor, and leftist activists to rethink their positions and strategies on immigration.

This project elucidates the politics of imagination in the United States and interrogates the conditions of democratic imagination in particular. I evaluate the role of imagination in political theory and in United States history, contextualizing my theoretical arguments through analyses of the Revolution and Founding and through a case study of the Populist movement of the late 19th century. I treat imagination as a productive and representative social power that is constituted in relation to the everyday terrain on which subjects, discourses, and material realities are formed and practiced. Imagination plays a paradoxical role in the history of political theory: it is a fundamental condition of political community, and yet it has the potential to transgress any given configuration of political order. Democratic theorists commonly respond to this paradox by moving to one side of it. Those concerned with democratic stability and belonging seek to ground imagination in some incontestable cultural authority; those concerned with democratic dynamism and freedom take the power of imagination to be illimitable. Constructing a conversation between Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Bakhtin, Hannah Arendt, and Populism, I argue that freedom requires attending to the everyday tensions between the stabilizing and dynamic powers of imagination. Contemporary mergers of capitalism, technology, and administrative power centralize political imagination by incorporating, concealing, or destroying competing cultural forms and practices. For the promise of freedom to survive, and at times even flourish, it is thus crucial to cultivate dynamic traditions, institutions, practices, and dispositions that can harbor emergent imaginings of democracy.

The first decade of the 21st century in the United States has seen the emergence of a number of protest movements based upon politically conservative ideas, including opposition to affirmative action, undocumented migration, and national health care, among others. Conservative social movement organizations like the Minutemen and the Tea Party have had enormous influence over American politics and society. Conservative movements such as these present challenges to existing ways of thinking about social movements. Most social movement research has centered on so-called progressive movements, like the Civil Rights Movement, which are assumed to be organized by an oppressed population fighting for rights they have been denied historically. However, conservative movements do not appear to involve an oppressed population fighting for rights denied to them. It seems that actually the reverse may be true: conservative protesters tend to be members of privileged populations in contrast to oppressed. But if conservative protesters tend to be privileged instead of oppressed, why then are they protesting? What are their goals?

To fully answer these questions, we must look beyond existing social movement theory. The purpose of my research is to extend social movement theory, particularly Rory McVeigh's theory of power devaluation by using Blumer's theory of racial group position and Bourdieu's conceptualization of capital to explore the motivations of conservative movements and how they construct movement ideologies. This research explores the goals and ideology of two conservative movements, the anti-illegal immigration movement and the anti-abortion/pro-life movement. To examine these movements, I first performed an ethnographic content analysis of over 1000 articles and posts from movement organization web pages. Second, I conducted nearly fifty semi-structured interviews with movement leaders and participants. Finally, I examined over twenty hours of speeches given at rallies and protest events.

Consistent with McVeigh's power devaluation theory and Blumer's theory of group position, I found that these conservative activists are motivated by perceived threats to privileges claimed as proprietary rights by their movement groups. Anti-illegal immigration groups perceive threats to existing privileges associated with employment, social services, citizenship, and cultural issues such as language, while anti-abortion groups cite threats to American morality. Furthermore, these groups make proprietary claims to these privileges based upon restrictive identity formations. While anti-illegal immigration activists identify as "American," they constrain who qualifies as an American based upon factors such as language spoken, cultural behaviors, and citizenship of parents. Similarly, anti-abortion/pro-life activists identify as "Christian," but exclude many who would be identified as Christian in the broader population based upon criteria including opposition to abortion and sexual preference. They also claim American is a Christian nation. Following Blumer's group position theory, I also analyzed those individuals from which these groups feel threatened: migrants crossing the border without documentation and women who get abortions. I found that conservative activists portrayed these individuals in terms of perpetrators and victims, providing only mixed support for group position. Finally, I examined the goals of anti-illegal immigration and anti-abortion/pro-life organizations specifically looking at non-policy-oriented goals. Anti-abortion/pro-life organizations emphasize changing American culture as much or, in many cases, more than changing laws. While most anti-illegal immigration organizations stress education as a goal, whether this is for the purposes of policy change or cultural change is unclear.

Although Tunisia has been celebrated as the unique success story of the Arab Spring, its emergent democracy has failed to resolve the structural inequalities that caused the 2011 revolution, or meaningfully include marginal subjects within its address. This dissertation documents the life-worlds of those left behind in Tunisia’s democratic transition by tracking the precarious labor of smuggling by youth in the Western-Central interior. For unemployed youth living in the shadow of underdevelopment, smuggling offers a rare avenue of insertion into productive life, where the border serves as a natural resource for generating value through arbitrage. Disappointed by the revolution’s implicit promise of structural change, many young Tunisians now use these routes of economic survival to join up with jihadist militias abroad. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kasserine, an impoverished province on Tunisia’s Algerian frontier, I examine how smuggling practice generates a landscape of ambivalent belonging to the nation, a “Shadow Zone” that elicits desire for the state, as well as the material means to evade it. I show how cross-border movement refracts the meaning of social justice for local actors, including petty smugglers and informal laborers who work the border economy, Tunisian families whose sons have been recruited to militias in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and unemployed youth and civil society groups who militate for equitable development.

“Taking the Moral Ground” examines the relationship between Protestantism and the movements for feminist and gay equality in North Carolina during the 1970s and 1980s to answer two central questions: How did a group of white heterosexual clergy, moderate mainliners, and African American ministers in central North Carolina become the spokespersons for feminist and gay liberation in the 1970s and 1980s? What did the theoretical frameworks of organized religion offer that made these types of unlikely alliances possible? To answer these questions “Taking the Moral Ground” begins with an exploration of the religious values that framed the upbringing, activist career, and ministry of Pauli Murray, a native of North Carolina and the first African American woman ordained by the Episcopal Church. Emphasizing the importance of the black freedom struggle and a universal understanding of human rights to her ministry, this dissertation moves on to explore how the key tenets Murray championed—universal love and justice—played out as religious feminists fought for women’s equality within a platform of intersectional social justice across North Carolina in the 1970s. Against the backdrop of a burgeoning movement for women’s liberation and the rise of the New Right, women across the state melded the philosophies of the social gospel with feminist practices like consciousness raising. They fought for stronger female representation at Duke Divinity School, more professional opportunities for women clergy, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the 1980s, gay Christians and moderate clergy picked up where feminists left off as they formed alliances with anti-racist groups and agitated for the acceptance of the LGBTQ community in local churches while simultaneously drawing on Christian values to support citizenship rights for gays and lesbians across the state. While organized religion provided plenty of obstacles to transplanting this vision of the religiously-driven inclusivity onto campaigns for women’s rights and gay liberation, it also offered institutional frameworks, rituals of belonging, and a certain theological flexibility that most strictly secular movements lacked. In this way, many of the religious coalitions forged during the 1970s and 1980s in North Carolina exceeded the effectiveness and organizational breadth of other strictly secular groups across the state and nation.

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, draws on fifteen months of field research accompanying organizers, participating in protests, planning/strategy meetings, state-run programs, academic conferences and everyday life in these two countries. Through comparative examination of the processes by which African Diaspora youth become radically politicized, this work deconstructs tendencies to deify political s/heroes of eras past by historicizing their ascent to political acclaim and centering the narratives of present youth leading movements for Black/African liberation across the Diaspora. I employ Manuel Callahan’s description of “encuentros”, “the disruption of despotic democracy and related white middle-class hegemony through the reconstruction of the collective subject”; “dialogue, insurgent learning, and convivial research that allows for a collective analysis and vision to emerge while affirming local struggles” to theorize the moments of encounter, specifically, the moments (in which) Black/African youth find themselves becoming politically radicalized and by what. I examine the ways in which Black/African youth organizing differs when responding to their perpetual victimization by neoliberal, genocidal state-politics in the US, and a Venezuelan state that has charged itself with the responsibility of radically improving the quality of life of all its citizens. Through comparative analysis, I suggest the vertical structures of “representative democracy” dominating the U.S. political climate remain unyielding to critical analyses of social stratification based on race, gender, and class as articulated by Black youth. Conversely, I contend that present Venezuelan attempts to construct and fortify more horizontal structures of “popular democracy” under what Hugo Chavez termed 21st Century Socialism, have resulted in social fissures, allowing for a more dynamic and hopeful negation between Afro-Venezuelan youth and the state.