Youth of Color Social Movements for Racial Justice: The Politics of Interrogating the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Youth social movements for racial justice, especially against police violence, are on the rise. And this broader policy landscape is reflective of how youth are addressing racism in policing in their local context. Therefore, by drawing upon scholarship related to Black Radicalism, activism, and social movements, this study examines how youth of color activists are fighting against the overpolicing of their schools and communities in two specific contexts: Wake County, North Carolina and Chicago, Illinois. This study demonstrates how context shapes youth of color social movement building, that youth are strategic in how they employ activism, and ultimately adults can either impede or help advance youth’s demands for justice.

Harvesting a participatory movement': Initial participatory action research with the Jewish Farmer Network

The Jewish Farmer Network (JFN) is a North American grassroots organization that mobilizes Jewish agricultural wisdom to build a more just and regenerative food system for all. This paper pre­sents methodological findings and reflections from the initial stages of a participatory action research (PAR) collaboration led by the authors and JFN organizers centered on Cultivating Culture, JFN’s inaugural conference in February 2020. For this early iterative phase, we used a PAR approach to guide event ethnography to both facilitate and understand collective movement building and action. This work included pre-conference collabo­rative research design, a participatory reflection and action workshop with roughly 90 participants, eval­uative surveys, short ethnographic interviews, and ongoing post-conference analysis with researchers and movement organizers. While this data was first analyzed and organized for JFN’s use, we present findings to demonstrate the effectiveness of fore­grounding event ethnography within a PAR re­search design at an early stage of movement for­mation, especially how elements of event ethnogra­phy can address some of the limitations of using PAR with a nascent network of farmers. Our work revealed themes in the movement of Jewish farm­ing: the politics of identity in movement building, the tensions around (de)politicization, and the production of Jewish agroecological knowledge. We reflect on the utility of using PAR to frame scholar-activism and propose future inquires for Jewish agrarianism.

“Nationalizing Local Struggles”

Chapter 2 offers a new model for understanding the dynamic relationship between local community organizing and national movement building. It highlights the critical contributions of local organizing to building the participation and leadership of those most impacted by injustice and to create organizational forms capable of sustaining campaigns to win policy changes. At the same time, it reveals the limitations of local organizing to dismantle a system of racial inequity deeply embedded in national structures, policies, and consciousness. It considers the contributions of national movements like influencing federal policy and challenging racist stereotypes and narratives. However, they are typically too narrowly focused on federal policy and dominated by Washington-based professional advocacy groups. Instead, movements can be stronger when they seek to strengthen and spread local organizing, “nationalizing local struggles,” and when groups grounded in communities most impacted by injustice share power with professional advocates.

The intimate labour of internationalism: maternalist humanitarians and the mid-twentieth century family planning movement

This article moves past high politics and the most prominent activists to explore the daily, intimate practice of international movement building by mid-level fieldworkers within the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) during its first decade of existence (1952–62). It illustrates how fieldworkers and the IPPF’s practitioner-oriented newsletter Around the World attempted to bridge the ideological and geographic diversity of the family planning movement and connect with advocates around the world through an emotive narrative of suffering, love, and global humanity, reinforced by affective bonds and women’s volunteerism. The story of global family planning must thus be seen not only as part of the history of eugenics, population control, and feminism, but also as part of the longer trajectory of maternalist humanitarianism. This mid-twentieth century version of maternalist humanitarianism built on earlier traditions but also incorporated concepts of human rights, critiques of dominant gender and sexual norms, and an official commitment to local self-determination in the context of decolonization movements. Still, the organization was plagued by the problems that shape humanitarianism more broadly, including the difficulty of moving past colonialist discourses, deeply rooted feelings of racial superiority, and the contradictions inherent in attempts to impose an impossible ideal of political neutrality in a politically complex world. Looking at the history of global family planning from this perspective thus helps us understand how the different traditions, intimate relationships, and practical experiences mid-level actors bring to their work shape the broader process of international movement building, beyond high-level political and ideological activism.

Community Translation: Translation as a social activity and its possible consequences in the advent of Web 2.0 and beyond

This introduction to the 10th issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series – Themes in translation Studies (LANS-TTS) begins by discussing the central concept of community translation, highlighting its terminological ambiguity. This is in part due to the already well-established field of community interpreting where the term is often used to mean the written translation of public information for immigrants. It is also an indication of the terminological instability typical of an emerging paradigm. For example, community translation is used more or less synonymously with such terms as translation crowdsourcing, user-generated translation and collaborative translation. The meaning of the term as we discuss in this issue can be best specified when the concept is anchored in the context of Web 2.0 (second generation web-technologies). This in turn acknowledges its intrinsic tie to online communities and directs us to new dynamics resulting from general Internet users acting as translators. While participants in community translation are not necessarily all unpaid, untrained volunteers community translation is used by some organisations as a mechanism to obtain free translations by going outside the professional translation sphere. To this end the ethical question of profit-making enterprises accessing free labour on the pretext of openness and sharing remains. That said, the author believes community translation is far more than a dilettante, anti-professional movement. Building on the emerging picture from the contributions in this volume, the author suggests some of the future directions that research on community translation might take, emphasising the need to reflect on the current translation practices and be open to the new developments and opportunities arising from the free and social Internet.

Redefining Goods Movement: Building an Ecosystem for the Introduction of Heavy-Duty Battery-Electric Vehicles

This article reviews the Volvo Low-Impact Heavy Green Transport Solution (LIGHTS) project, a multifaceted public–private partnership in Southern California, and provides some early insights and a model for successful fleet adoption of Class 8 battery-electric trucks. This paradigm shift in commercial trucking is emerging, forcing greater interdependence among many stakeholders—fleets, %, truck manufacturers, and policymakers—not currently engaged in the traditional heavy-duty commercial truck market. The many perspectives from this article such as lead times and costs associated with the deployment of charging infrastructure, developing the workforce to support largescale deployments, and the need for market development incentives from the government can be used to inform the programs and policies of California and other states seeking to follow their lead.

Movement building responses to COVID-19: lessons from the JASS mobilisation fund

This article draws on the work of Just Associates (JASS), a feminist movement support organisation that strengthens the leadership and organising capacity of community-based women networks in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica, to transform the structures that perpetuate inequality and violence. We analyse qualitative interviews and surveys drawn from recipients of the JASS mobilisation fund (JMF), an innovative financial crisis support mechanism for feminist movements. We argue that localisation strategies deployed by women’s networks supported by the JMF in response to COVID-19, challenge dominant humanitarian responses that de-centre feminist movements, local knowledge, and expertise. By accounting for local knowledge generated from long histories of movement building, building collective power, and challenging racialised and gendered responses to humanitarian crises, women’s collectives and networks supported through the JMF developed contextually relevant responses that challenge patriarchal structural barriers heightened by COVID-19.

Organising around ideas: Why we need to take the battle of ideas in education more seriously

In this article we develop the notion of 'organising around ideas'. We highlight the ways in which education debate in England has narrowed as traditional spaces for discussion and debate have been closed down. The state now has extraordinary power to shape discourses and frame narratives about the purposes of schooling. Here we argue that we must find new ways to engage in the battle of ideas, not simply as an exercise in rational argument, but as an essential element of organising and movement building. The article provides three short case studies of 'organising around ideas' in action to illustrate what this work can look like. The cases are not templates, but illustrate the flexible, grassroots-based activity that is central to building a movement from the bottom up.

Recognition for resistance: Gifting, social media, and the politics of reciprocity in South Korean energy activism

This article argues for adopting the theoretical lens of gift exchange and reciprocity into the study of social movements and social media in an attempt to widen the horizon of the field of protest and media beyond its technological orientation. This lens invites us to see how protesters can build a movement strategically through the practice of gifting and the principle of reciprocity, and how such practices intersect with socially situated usages of digital media technologies to mediate and facilitate the politics of reciprocity. Based on an ethnographic analysis of energy activism in South Korea, the study suggests four necessary conditions for movement-building through culturally and technologically mediated forms of gift and reciprocity: pursuit of inclusive and open-ended alliances, prohibition of negative exchange, commitment to mutual interest aligned with shared movement goals, and the maintenance of voluntary and creative participation in gift exchange.