Social Movement as Cognitive Praxis: The Case of the Student Movement and the Labor Movement in Hong Kong

Author(s):  
Benjamin K.P. Leung
Author(s):  
Francis L. F Lee ◽  
Joseph M Chan

Chapter 1 introduces the background of the Umbrella Movement, a protest movement that took hold in Hong Kong in 2014, and outlines the theoretical principles underlying the analysis of the role of media and communication in the occupation campaign. It explicates how the Umbrella Movement is similar to but also different from the ideal-typical networked social movement and crowd-enabled connective action. It explains why the Umbrella Movement should be seen as a case in which the logic of connective action intervenes into a planned collective action. It also introduces the notion of conditioned contingencies and the conceptualization of an integrated media system.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-380
Author(s):  
Benny Yiu-ting Tai

Bill Moyer observed that there are eight stages in a social movement: seeming normal, exposing injustice, ripening conditions, taking off, losing heart, winning the majority, reaping success and consolidating achievement. For more than 30 years, Hong Kong people have been striving for democracy. Applying Moyer’s model, Hong Kong should be now at a stage close to reaching its ultimate goal of establishing a genuine democratic system in the territory after years of work, especially the triggering event in September 2014 and the occupation during the Umbrella Movement. However, Moyer’s model cannot be mechanically applied to the case of Hong Kong in light of the unique situation faced by Hong Kong people. Hong Kong’s authoritarian sovereign holds the final key to Hong Kong’s door to democracy. Unless there is a significant shift in the balance of powers in the Chinese polity, Hong Kong’s democracy may be so near and yet so far.


2016 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 5-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Merrill ◽  
Susan J. Schurman

AbstractWorkers’ education, understood to mean the education of workers by workers for purposes they themselves determine, has always been highly contested terrain, just like work itself. If there is to be an adequate global history of workers’ education, it will need to be guided by a suitable general theory. Hegel most expansively and Durkheim most persuasively argued that societies are cognitive and moral projects, of which education is constitutive: knowing and social being are inextricably bound up with one another. In the global democratic revolutions of the last 250 years, the labor movement distinguished itself as simultaneously a social movement, an education in democracy, and a struggle for a democratic education. The history of workers’ education is a history of workers striving to remake their communities into democracies and themselves into democrats. This brief essay introduces a collection of essays representative of a new generation of scholarship on the history of workers’ education, which we hope will help both traditional and emerging labor movements understand their past and think more clearly about their future.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Dixon ◽  
William Danaher ◽  
Ben Kail

Social movement scholars suggest that coalitions comprise a significant and growing portion of all protest mobilizations. Such organizational collaboration is of great practical importance to the labor movement in particular, as unions struggle to succeed on their own in a difficult economic and political environment. Yet surprisingly little is known about the factors underlying the development and success of coalitions. In this article we advance literature on labor and social movement coalitions, bringing a comparative historical approach to bear on the problem and examining two influential and far-reaching labor campaigns that occurred in the U. S. South. Our argument and findings demonstrate the importance of the relative fit among coalition members, the vulnerabilities of collective action targets, and their interplay for coalition outcomes. We conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for labor and social movement challenges more generally.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1129-1143
Author(s):  
Barbara Laubenthal ◽  
Daniel Schumacher

This article focuses on campaigns by former colonial soldiers from Nepal and Hong Kong and their struggles for British citizenship over the last three decades. When analysing these mobilizations, we combine approaches from social movement research with insights from cultural memory studies. We use the concept of ‘relational fields’ to determine how these former colonial soldiers systematically utilized the past as a political framing device and thus revealed themselves to be not outsiders to the political system but equal players therein. We argue that their actions are best understood as a series of connected postcolonial civil rights campaigns that often reinforce rather than reverse romanticized and positivist representations of Britain’s imperial past. While in some instances colonial veterans were able to mount meaningful political interventions, our analysis shows that the veterans’ eventual acceptance into British society could only come at the price of their continued stereotyped depiction as colonial subjects.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document