From Women and Work to Climate Change Activism

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Lisa Dicaprio
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public History ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
International Justice ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Sustainability Literacy

The chapter explains how the author’s political activism in the 1970s and 1980s, including the cofounding of Chicago Women in Trades, which began as a support group for women carpenters, and structural changes in the academy in the 2000s framed the three main phases of a nontraditional path to and within academia. The journey has included focused work on women, work, and social welfare during the French Revolution, human rights and international justice, and sustainability literacy and climate change activism. The 2002 Catherine Prelinger Award allowed travel to the Balkans to carry out research and produce a public history photographic exhibit on the international campaign for justice for the survivors of the genocide in Srebrenica.

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.

Love, Inc.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Dating Apps ◽  
Sense Of Security ◽  
True Love ◽  
The Future ◽  
False Sense ◽  
Global Movements

In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig argues that love is not all we need. As the future became less secure—with global climate change and the transfer of wealth to the few—Americans became more romantic. Romance is not just what lovers do but also what lovers learn through ideology. As an ideology, romance allowed us to privatize our futures, to imagine ourselves as safe and secure tomorrow if only we could find our "one true love" today. But the fairy dust of romance blinded us to what we really need: global movements and structural changes. By traveling through dating apps and spectacular engagements, white weddings and Disney honeymoons, Essig shows us how romance was sold to us and why we bought it. Love, Inc. seduced so many of us into a false sense of security, but it also, paradoxically, gives us hope in hopeless times. This book explores the struggle between our inner cynics and our inner romantic.

Human Rights and Climate Change

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhan McInerney-Lankford ◽  
Mac Darrow ◽  
Lavanya Rajamani
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights

Coming Home to a Foreign Land

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-26
Author(s):  
Michael Daxner
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Final Curtain ◽  
Holding Back ◽  
Lack Of Knowledge

These days, the old Europe is moving towards its final curtain call. The war in the Balkans is a spectre which repeats and concludes all that happened in the last century; and a ghostly farce unrolls before us. Concepts like war and peace, the rights of nations, humanity and human rights are the conceptual covers of a happening now ripening into fateful maturity. Its primary causes were a tactical holding back, a lack of knowledge of the real circumstances, secret and openly expressed prejudices, and a shabby mentality of 'not getting involved'. As a result of this, all structures are being destroyed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document