Politics and Social Change Commons^™

Social Action Teaching: Engaging Middle School Students In Knowing And Doing In The Social Studies Classroom, Alyssa Hinkell

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

For the past three years I have had countless opportunities to engage in rich thinking around teaching and learning. As a member of the Critical and Creative Thinking Program (CCT) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston I have been able to reflect on these experiences in the context of my own teaching, applying what I have learned to enrich my own craft. Over the past eight months I have devoted this thinking to a teaching method I call Social Action Teaching. This method has helped to engage and motivate my seventh grade students and I believe, if applied elsewhere, can …

From Democratization To Globalization To Justice: Political Generations In Hungarian Environmentalism From The 1980s To The 2000s, Krista Harper

Krista M. Harper

This presentation applies sociologist Nancy Whittier's concept of "political generations" to explore political identities and strategies appearing over time in the Hungarian environmental movement. I discuss the rise of democratic environmentalism in the 1980s, the shift to a more professionalized and globally oriented activist stance in the 1990s, and the emergence of social justice frames associated with the newest cohort of environmental activists of the 2000s.

Doing Good, Being Good, And The Social Construction Of Compassion, Amy Blackstone

Sociology School Faculty Scholarship

Activists and volunteers in the United States face the dilemma of having to negotiate the ideals of American individualism with their own acts of compassion. In this article, I consider how activists and volunteers socially construct compassion. Data from ethnographic research in the breast cancer and antirape movements are analyzed. The processes through which compassion is constructed are revealed in participants’ actions and in their identities. It is through their actions (or “doing good”) and their perceptions and presentations of themselves (“being good”) that participants construct compassion as a gendered phenomenon. Together, the processes of doing good and being good …

The Search For Self-Fulfillment: How Individualism Undermines Community Organizing, Rachel Rybaczuk

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This paper focuses on the role of individualism in community organizing. My case study follows the organizing efforts of the Coalition for Affordable Northampton Neighborhoods (CANN) and residents’ attempts to save an affordable neighborhood from Smith College’s campus expansion. As a resident and co-founder of CANN I was particularly interested in identifying the reasons for our difficulty in organizing residents whose homes would be torn down. While attending community and city meetings, interviewing core activists and activists who left the organizing efforts, I observed individualism undermining community organizing and political involvement. People’s search for self-fulfillment was in conflict with the …

From Democratization To Globalization To Justice: Political Generations In Hungarian Environmentalism From The 1980s To The 2000s, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

This presentation applies sociologist Nancy Whittier's concept of "political generations" to explore political identities and strategies appearing over time in the Hungarian environmental movement. I discuss the rise of democratic environmentalism in the 1980s, the shift to a more professionalized and globally oriented activist stance in the 1990s, and the emergence of social justice frames associated with the newest cohort of environmental activists of the 2000s.

Kathie Barrett On The Global Justice Movement: Cross-National And Transnational Perspectives Edited By Donatella Della Porta. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. 278pp., Kathie Barrett

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

The Global Justice Movement: Cross-National and Transnational Perspectives edited by Donatella Della Porta. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. 278pp.

Introduction: New Media And The Reconfiguration Of Power In Global Politics, Athina Karatzogianni Dr

Athina Karatzogianni

Whatever the developments and transformations in the sphere of global politics, the new media technologies and the political opportunities they present are unsettling the world system, the are rendering it chaotic and they are having a deeper systemic effect than the more powerful actors care to admit. It remains to be seen whether information age ideologies, new modes of capitalism, conflict, activism, terrorism and war in cyberspace will ever transfer to the ‘real world’ reversing the opposite trend, and causing everyday effects on a bigger scale than we are witnessing today. Even so, we are undoubtedly living in interesting times …