scholarly journals The legal field as battleground for social struggle: Reclaiming law from the margins

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Pecile
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Political Praxis

Scepticism towards law’s potential of fostering social change has been widespread in critical theory and contributed to strengthen social movements’ mistrust vis-à-vis the use of legal tools to advance their claims. Such “anti-law” posture is based on the assumption that law would formalise existing relations of domination and posits the need for a political praxis liberated from “legalistic drifts”. This article discusses how legal tactics in favour of social change have been employed by social movements exerting a counter-hegemonic use of law in the post-2008 economic crisis conjuncture. The example of the struggle for the commons will be analysed as paradigmatic of how the interests of the marginalised can be protected by resorting to existing property arrangements, and how it is possible to reclaim law from the margins.

Communicative Action in Practice: Intersubjectivity and New Social Movements

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Alternative Dispute Resolution ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
First Moment

Critical theory has two distinct aims: the analysis and critique of particular existing oppressions, and the more emancipatory or reconstructive method or goal needed to move beyond current conditions. But often critical theory is too preoccupied with the first moment to consider the second. This essay examines the evolution of the notion of communicative action and a number of current debates surrounding especially Habermas's theory. It then examines two existing social change movements which incorporate aspects of communicative action into their everyday practices–the Alternative Dispute Resolution movement and the Direct Action movement–and illustrates how certain theoretical dilemmas are actually played out. The argument is that the practices of communicative action can help illuminate academic debates. Critical practice is not only an expression of critical theory, but can be used as an ongoing reflective guide for that theory.

The Shadow Society and Its Fictitious Capital

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Professional Expertise ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Fictitious Capital ◽  
Equitable Outcomes ◽  
National Economies

The concluding chapter surveys the prospects for more democratic governance of national economies and more equitable outcomes in the global economy. The backdrop for the chapter is the marriage of shadow finance with the conservative governments that have achieved electoral success on the basis of popular dissatisfaction with the response of neoliberal governments to the global economic crisis. The conservative movement and its governments are incoherent and unwilling to address, even in terms of modest reform, the power of finance and its responsibility for inequality and crisis. Effective reform could emerge from the union of professional expertise, whose commitment to technocratic aspects of the neoliberal project may have weakened, with democratic social movements.

Getting to a Utopian World Beyond Gender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
Structure Framework ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Inclusive Society ◽  
Fourth Wave ◽  
Different Levels

This final chapter suggests that the incompatibilities of expectations and realities at different levels of the gender structure create “crises tendencies” that may provide leverage that future activists can use to push for social change. While some contemporary social movements agitating for a more feminist and gender inclusive society appear to conflict with each other, Risman argues that using a gender structure framework allows seemingly contradictory feminist and gender inclusive movements to understood they are not alternatives but rather a tapestry, each one taking aim at a different level of our complex gender structure. The chapter concludes with a utopian vision: a call for a fourth wave of feminism to dismantle the gender structure. Since the gender structure constrains freedom, to move toward a more just future we must leave it behind.

Critical Theory, Curricular Transformation and Feminist Mainstreaming

1984 ◽  
Vol 166 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti Lather
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Women's Studies ◽  
Curricular Change ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Women’S Studies ◽  
Curricular Transformation ◽  
Change Efforts

This paper examines critical theory, especially the work of Antonio Gramsci, in relation to feminist curricular change efforts in teacher education. It is contended that women's studies is potentially a prime example of curriculum as counter-hegemonic force. Critical theory is taken to task for the male-centeredness of its search for historical actors. The possibilities for fundamental social change that open up when we put women at the center of our transformative aspirations are explored.

scholarly journals A political ontology of seeds

Focaal ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (69) ◽  
pp. 45-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Demeulenaere
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Seed Production ◽  
Regulation System ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Agricultural Modernization ◽  
Scientific Paradigms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Breeding Practices

This article follows the trajectory of a French farmers' movement that contests the seed production and regulation system set in place during agricultural modernization. It focuses on the creativity of the movement, which ranges from semantic innovations (such as “peasant seeds”) to the reinvention of onfarm breeding practices based on new scientific paradigms, and includes new alliances with the social movements defending the commons. The trajectory of the movement is shaped by its encounters—with scientists, other international seed contestations, and other social movements—and by the productive frictions they create. This in-depth reframing of the activities connected to seeds contributes to building a counternarrative about farmers and seeds that reopens spaces for contestation. In this counternarrative, “peasant seeds” play a central and subversive role in the sense that they question the ontological assumptions of present seed laws.

scholarly journals GERAKAN SOSIAL DAN NALAR ISLAM PROGRESIF: MENCARI TITIK TEMU KERANGKA METATEORI

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 281
Author(s):  
Ahmad Izudin
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Important Position ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
Meta Theory

This article will examine how progressive Islam’s reasoning can be a reference to free human beings from the exploitation and domination of social class? So what social movements can we do in the midst of crush the nation’s problems related to the exploitation of natural resources that increasingly vine? From this point on, I hope to get a meta-theory regulation that can be implied entirely for the benefit of society, in order to be free from exploitation and domination. To answer this important position, the discourse of social movements can be mapped into two, namely old social movement and new social movement. While Islam as a universal religion, there is no need to discuss theological-transcendental issues, but how the theology should create a new, more applicable avenue of dialectics to answer the question the rulers of powers domination. In the hope of a progressive, inclusive, open-minded, and pluralist theological doctrine. The results of this study may contribute to the development of science and the movement that became a turning point and reference in social change.[Artikel ini hendak mengkaji bagaimana nalar Islam progresif yang dapat menjadi acuan untuk membebaskan manusia dari eksploitasi dan dominasi kelas sosial? Lantas gerakan sosial apa yang dapat kita lakukan di tengah himpitan persoalan bangsa terkait eksploitasi sumber daya alam yang kian menggurita? Dari titik ini, maka saya berharap mendapat satu regulasi metateori yang bisa diimplikasikan sepenuhnya untuk kepentingan masyarakat, agar bisa terbebas dari ekspolitasi dan dominasi. Untuk menjawab posisi penting ini, maka diskursus gerakan sosial dapat dipetakan menjadi dua, yakni old social movement dan new social movement. Sementara Islam sebagai agama universal, tidak perlu lagi membahas persoalan teologis-transendental, tetapi bagaimana teologi itu harus menciptakan ruang dealektika baru yang lebih aplikatif menjawab persoalan dominasi kekuasaan para penguasa. Dengan harapan munculnya doktrin teologis yang progresif, inklusif, open-minded, dan pluralis. Hasil kajian ini semoga memberikan kontribusi bagi perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan dan gerakan yang menjadi titik balik dan acuan dalam perubahan sosial.]

scholarly journals Progressive Social Movements and the Internet

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Public Sphere

Because of the field’s foundational concerns with both social power and media, communication scholars have long been at the center of scholarly thought at the intersection of social change and technology. Early critical scholarship in communication named media technologies as central in the creation and maintenance of dominant political ideologies and as a balm against dissent among the masses. This work detailed the marginalization of groups who faced restricted access to mass media creation and exclusion from representational discourse and images, alongside the connections of mass media institutions to political and cultural elites. Yet scholars also highlighted the ways collectives use media technologies for resistance inside their communities and as interventions in the public sphere. Following the advent of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, and the granting of public access to the Internet in 1991, communication scholars faced a medium that seemed to buck the one-way and gatekeeping norms of others. There was much optimism about the democratic potentials of this new technology. With the integration of Internet technology into everyday life, and its central role in shaping politics and culture in the 21st century, scholars face new questions about its role in dissent and collective efforts for social change. The Internet requires us to reconsider definitions of the public sphere and civil society, document the potentials and limitations of access to and creation of resistant and revolutionary media, and observe and predict the rapidly changing infrastructures and corresponding uses of technology—including the temporality of online messaging alongside the increasingly transnational reach of social movement organizing. Optimism remains, but it has been tempered by the realities of the Internet’s limitations as an activist tool and warnings of the Internet-enabled evolution of state suppression and surveillance of social movements. Across the body of critical work on these topics particular characteristics of the Internet, including its rapidly evolving infrastructures and individualized nature, have led scholars to explore new conceptualizations of collective action and power in a digital media landscape.

scholarly journals Novas formas associativas na produção recente de moradia social no Brasil

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camila Moreno de Camargo
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Housing Policy ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Housing Production ◽  
Brazilian Government ◽  
And Performance

O presente artigo aborda aspectos relacionados à produção habitacional da modalidade “Entidades” do programa Minha Casa, Minha Vida, a partir de observações de campo. Pretende-se elaborar uma chave de leitura que destaque, no contexto de atendimento do programa federal mencionado, as entidades organizadoras e os diferentes graus de vinculação e relação que estabelecem com os movimentos de luta por moradias nacionais, a sociedade e o próprio Estado. Tais questões vêm se construindo e nos mostram certa urgência de análise e pesquisas mais aprofundadas, no sentido de avançar na discussão acerca da produção habitacional por meio da autogestão no Brasil, visto que, ainda que inexpressivo do ponto de vista quantitativo e em comparação com a produção mais massiva empreendida pelo mercado, ela nos revela uma série de transformações que vem redefinindo as relações sociais e a produção do espaço urbano contemporâneo. Palavras-chave: habitação de interesse social; Minha Casa, Minha Vida; entidades; movimentos sociais; política habitacional. Abstract: In response to the global economic crisis of 2009, the brazilian government launched the Minha Casa, Minha Vida – MCMV program, with the purpose of producing one million houses in the country. In its second phase, currently the program aims to produce another two million housing in the country. This production occurs by means partnership among actors at the various political, commercial, social and voluntary levels. In this context, this article aims to develop a new key for reading the entities responsible for organising the construction of the project contracted and the different degrees of attachment and relationship they establish with the national fight for housing movements, the society and the state itself, in the composition of demand and performance location. Such questions show some urgency in the analysis and further research for advancing in discussion about housing production through self-management in Brazil, it reveals a series of transformations that has been redefining social relations and production of contemporary urban space. Keywords: social interest housing; “Minha Casa, Minha Vida”; entities; social movements; housing policy.

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