Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-20th Century Chile: Foregrounding Mapuche Women and Transnational Conversations

Mapuche intellectuals and political activists in early- to mid-20th-century Chile both worked within and subverted dominant modernizing and “civilizing” educational discourses. Mapuche women played an important role in the movement to democratize schooling in early-20th-century Chile by publishing articles in little-known Mapuche-run newspapers and advocating for Mapuche education broadly as well as specifically for women. There was also an important transnational dimension of Mapuche political organizing around education rights during this period. These two underexplored but important aspects of indigenous activism in Chile open interesting questions about the intersections between race, gender, and nation in the sphere of education.

The Art of Organizing

The fourth chapter is an exploration both of the concept of organizing as distinct from mobilization, as an understudied yet critically important part of creating political change, and of the unique semi-federated organizational structure of the Movement for Black Lives. Political organizing, which is what leaders in social movements do, funds the capacity for political actors to recognize themselves as political subjects capable of acting, of creating something unexpected and new. It is not primarily about assembling a mass of people for a political cause (mobilization), nor “turning up” in defiance of authorities though protest (activism). In other words, political organizing is distinct from either mobilization or activism in that its result is not to do a thing but to become the kind of person who does what is to be done, and as such, it is of critical import to democracy itself.

Sky’s the Limit

In this chapter, the author defends the claim that utopias can, and should, inform attempts to craft and effectuate successful programs of radical change. Specifically, it is argued that social and political organizing, even in response to seemingly intractable issues like systemic racial injustice, must ultimately be grounded in realistic utopian visions. This concept is borrowed from Erik Olin Wright and refined to argue that realistic utopias highlight the human potential for radical change and force us to recognize that the boundaries of what is possible are structurally contestable. The author conjoins this analysis with Elizabeth Anderson’s recent discussion of social movements as experiments in morality. For Anderson, social movements extend moral critique beyond the domain of mere theory by offering unique experiments in living morally. Along these lines, the chapter argues that the Movement for Black Lives offers a valuable case study in how we can experiment with realistic utopias.

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Film and the Politics of Negative Community. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dialectic in the Late 1970s Polish People’s Republic

Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in the late 1970s saw an increased alliance among, and indeed, a blending of, workers and intellectuals, young and old, women and men, actively struggling against the state. A new kind of solidarity emerged that threw off tired notions of what constituted the working class. The preeminent filmmaker of this time, Krzysztof Kieślowski, is often seen as increasingly depoliticized as he moved into fiction, but in this paper the author argues for the dialogic value of his work with respect to political organizing. Kieślowski’s documentarist sensitivity to registering Polish reality and the intimacy of human engagement with the world led him to question the prevailing mode of representing these shifts in politics and class. His feature films, in articulating failures of representation, challenge a “realism” that purported to be universal, but instead reified a certain historical anxiety in the Polish political imaginary (workers vs. intellectuals, urban elites vs. peasantry), or precisely that which was being unraveled by the praxis of the late 1970s. Further, they refuse to cordon off interests of individuals from the very state shown to be oppressing them. Here we have a filmic counterpart to the immanent praxis of workers and intellectuals that turned one of the engines of the state—the trade union—into the greatest weapon against it. The author shows how this functions, in negative terms, in Kieślowski’s first feature, Blizna/The Scar (1976), in which class solidarity is felt stylistically as aporia, and is further developed in Amator/Camera Buff (1979), which expresses the personal as political in the tension between the desire for spokój (peace and quiet) and czegoś wiecej (something more). Rather than a retreat, we should see this in correspondence with the revolutionary consciousness being inscribed in individual Poles by the collective labor action of Solidarity in 1980.

'OK Boomer': Internet Memes as Consciousness Building

While the role of the internet and social media in influencing political organizing has gained the attention of scholars in recent years, less attention has been paid to the social influence of internet memes specifically. Internet memes, generally understood as an image overlaid with a word or series of words, have become a ubiquitous form of communication, especially for younger generations. A recent notable example is the emergence of the “OK Boomer” meme. Meant to express the political frustration of Millennials and younger generations with what they see as a fundamentally inequitable and hostile political landscape, the OK Boomer meme has become a shorthand way of signaling one’s understanding of the deepening structural inequalities that present unprecedented challenges for our nation’s youth. By outlining the sociopolitical and economic conditions that precipitated the OK Boomer meme, we argue that internet memes can be understood as consciousness building work that is a necessary precondition for political organizing. Lastly, we discuss the OK Boomer meme as a form of public pedagogy.

Alternative Conceptions of Adolescence as a Basis for Curriculum

Adolescence has been defined as a unique stage of development, and youth are marked and understood by their differences from adults and children. This perceived border between youth and adults also influences curriculum development, since knowledge for youth is often determined by their current developmental stage and/or what they need to know and be able to do when they are adults. Thus, curricular knowledge often participates in keeping youth “less than” adults. When we start with a conception of youth that emphasizes their competence or power, curricular options open. If we recognize that youth can take on political organizing or use social media in more sophisticated ways than adults, schools’ tight management of youth appears overzealous and miseducative. To rethink conceptions of youth, educators must confront the power differentials built into and maintained by school curricular knowledge.