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Riots, rebellions, and revolutions have always captured our attention. But moments of upheaval do not contrast as strongly with "normal" times as many social historians, sociologists, and political scientists have assumed. Offering examples from South Asia, these essays examine subtle forms of the "everyday resistance" and varieties of the everyday use of power that mark the patterns of ordinary life in the region. These essays are part of a larger effort to understand the history of subordination in India. They focus on peasants and urban laborers, courtesans and merchants, sometimes employing unconventional sources and methods. By depicting a rich variety of non-confrontational forms of resistance and contestatory behaviors, the authors challenge our usual assumptions about the overt nature of resistance to dominant powerholders. Taken together, the essays suggest that we must consider a much wider range of socio-cultural practices if we wish to understand how the world of dominated groups is constrained, modified, and conditioned by power relations. Identifying the "everydayness" of resistance in social life thus reveals a social structure formed from a constellation of contradictory and contestatory processes, rather than a seamless, functional whole. At the same time, struggle is portrayed as something that is constantly being conditioned by the structures of social and political power. As the editors note, "neither domination nor resistance is autonomous; the two are entangled together so that it becomes difficult to analyze one without discussing the effects of the other".
Contesting Media Power is the most ambitious international collection to date on the worldwide growth of alternative media that are challenging the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analyzing alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums, feminist film, political journalism and social networks, indigenous communication, and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles, such as the anti-globalization movement.
Argues that ordinary people exercise extraordinary political courage and power in American politics when, frustrated by politics as usual, they rise up in anger and hope, and defy the authorities and the status quo rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives. By doing so, they disrupt the workings of important institutions and become a force in American politics. Drawing on critical episodes in U.S. history, Piven shows that it is in fact precisely at those seismic moments when people act outside of political norms that they become empowered to their full democratic potential.
Contesting Media Power is the most ambitious international collection to date on the worldwide growth of alternative media that are challenging the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analyzing alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums, feminist film, political journalism and social networks, indigenous communication, and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles, such as the anti-globalization movement.
Poonam Bala’s Contesting Colonial Authority explores the interplay of conformity and defiance amongst the plural medical tradition in colonial India. The contributors reveal how Indian elites, nationalists, and the rest of the Indian population participated in the move to revisit and frame a new social character of Indian Medicine. Viewed in the light of the cultural, nationalistic, social, literary and scientific essentials, Contesting Colonial Authority highlights various indigenous interpretations and mechanisms through which Indian sciences and medicine were projected against the cultural background of a rich medical tradition.
What do community organizations and organizers do, and what should they do? "Contesting Community" addresses one of the vital issues of our day-the role and meaning of community in people's lives and in the larger political economy. It paints a more critical picture of community work which, according to the authors-in both theory and practice-has amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Their comparative study of efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada describes and analyzes the limits and potential of this work.
Contesting Security investigates to what extent the ‘logic of security’, which underpins securitization, can be contained, rolled back or dismantled. Featuring legitimacy as a cement of security practices, this volume presents a detailed account of the "logic" which sustains security in order to develop a novel approach to the relation between security and the policies in which it is engraved. Understanding security as a normative practice, the contributors suggest a nuanced, and richer take on the conditions under which it is possible, advisable or fair to accept or roll back its policies. The book comprises four sections, each investigating one specific modality of contesting security practices: resistance, desecuritization, emancipation, and resilience. These strategies are examined, compared and assessed in different political and cultural habitats. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, securitisation theory, social theory, and IR in general.
Whether a pilgrimage centers around a place, a visionary individual, or a text, it brings widely diverse individuals and their beliefs, doctrines, and expectations into contact with each other. This important collection assesses the qualities and power of pilgrimage shrines as sites for accommodating various, often competing, meanings and practices, both among pilgrims and between shrine custodians and devotees. Contributors discuss the highly organized shrine at Lourdes and also the shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo in Sangiovannesi, Italy, where conflicting interests among townspeople and pilgrims have crystallized around the life and the remains, respectively, of a holy man. Other contributors consider the competing images of Jerusalem among pilgrims of various Christian faiths-Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Christian Zionist-and explore the unique attributes of shrines in Sri Lanka and Peru. A major advance in understanding the complexity of pilgrimage, Contesting the Sacred provides valuable insight into the process of exchange between human beings and the divine that gives pilgrimage its central rationale. John Eade's new introduction places the book's theoretical frame in the context of recent thinking and writing on pilgrimage and considers the impact of globalization and tourism on pilgrimage cults and sites.
Investigates the conditions which lead workers to leave state-controlled unions and establish independent organizations under authoritarian rule in Egypt.
At a time when the development promise is increasingly in question, with dwindling social gains, the vision of modernity is losing its legitimacy and coherence. This moment is observable through the lens of critical struggles of those who experience disempowerment, displacement and development contradictions. In this book, case studies serve as an effective means of teaching key concepts and theories in the sociology of development. This collection of cases, all original, never previously published and with framing essays by Phillip McMichael, has been written with this purpose in mind. An important additional feature is that the book as a whole reveals the limiting assumptions of development and suggests alternate conditions of possibility for social existence in the world today. In that sense, the book pushes the boundaries of "thinking about development" and makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature.