SOC09002 2022 Social Transformation

Students will identify and analyse historical and contemporary social movements and evaluate approaches to mobilising for social justice  including participatory art based and community development approaches.  

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. "Sunstein's book is illuminating because it puts norms at the center of how we think about change."David Brooks, The New York Times How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology, and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens. Sunstein focuses on the crucial role of social normsand on their frequent collapse. When norms lead people to silence themselves, even an unpopular status quo can persist. Then one day, someone challenges the norma child who exclaims that the emperor has no clothes; a woman who says me too. Sometimes suppressed outrage is unleashed, and long-standing practices fall. Sometimes change is more gradual, as nudges help produce new and different decisionsapps that count calories; texted reminders of deadlines; automatic enrollment in green energy or pension plans. Sunstein explores what kinds of nudges are effective and shows why nudges sometimes give way to bans and mandates. Finally, he considers social divisions, social cascades, and partyism, when identification with a political party creates a strong bias against all members of an opposing partywhich can both fuel and block social change.

Providing a unique blend of cases, concepts, and essential readings The Social Movements Reader, Third Edition, delivers key classic and contemporary articles and book selections from around the world. Includes the latest research on contemporary movements in the US and abroad, including the Arab spring, Occupy, and the global justice movement Provides original texts, many of them classics in the field, which have been edited for the non-technical reader Combines the strengths of a reader and a textbook with selected readings and extensive editorial material Sidebars offer concise definitions of key terms, as well as biographies of famous activists and chronologies of several key movements Requires no prior knowledge about social movements or theories of social movements

Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader expands on standard studies of social movements by offering a collection of writings that is exclusively anthropological in nature and global in its focus-thereby serving as an invaluable tool for instructors and students alike. Based on fieldwork carried out on four continents - North America, South America, Africa, and Asia - and in 14 countries Includes articles that address problems ranging from global health and the spread of diseases; loss of control over basic resources such as water and fuel; militarization; to the repression of indigenous peoples and of women Offers solutions formulated by local peoples

The first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968 The sixties were a time when radical movements learned to embrace twentieth-century Marxism. Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of this turning point, and examines what the resistance of today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che. It tells the story of the new communist movement which was the most racially integrated and fast-growing movement on the Left. Thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Liberation, and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian-American movements, embraced a Third World oriented version of Marxism. These admirers of Mao, Che and Amilcar Cabral organized resistance to the Republican majorities of Nixon and Ford. By the 1980s these groups had either collapsed or become tiny shards of the dream of a Maoist world revolution. Taking issue with the idea of a division between an early good sixties and a later bad sixties, Max Elbaum is particularly concerned to reclaim the lessons of the new communist movement for todays activists who, like their sixties predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks mass support and is fragmented along racial lines. With a new foreward by Alicia Garza, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter.

An incredible, absorbing new collection of interviews on contemporary society from Noam Chomsky - 'the world's greatest public intellectual' Observer In this powerful collection of interviews, Noam Chomsky exposes the problems of our world today, as we stand in this period of monumental change, preparing for a more hopeful tomorrow. He sheds light into the phenomenon of right-wing populism, and exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of authoritarian policies on people, the environment and the planet as a whole. He captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society. And he celebrates the recent unprecedented mobilizations of millions of people internationally against neoliberal capitalism, racism and police violence.

Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its timepredicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the artsbut also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronells introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.

The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is an 1848 political document by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions", which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world. In 2013, The Communist Manifesto was registered to UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme along with Marx's Capital, Volume I.

Allen, L. 2013. The rise and fall of human rights. Cynicism and politics in occupied Palestine. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Burchardt, M., Patterson, A.S. and Mubanda Rasmussen, L. (Eds). (2013). The politics and anti-politics of social movements:religion and HIV/AIDS in Africa. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 47(2).

Cary, H. “Constructing studenthood: student activism and the role of representative groups in the process of identification” Irish Journal of Anthropology 16 (2) 2013. 26 – 30.

Chandra, U., and Majumder, A. Eds). (2013). The ethics of self-making in postcolonial India. South Asia multidisciplinary academic journal, 7.

Kasmir, S. 2005. “Activism and Class Identity: The Saturn Auto Factory case” in Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. June Nash (Ed.)Blackwell Publishing LTD.: Oxford. 78-95.

Moser, A. 2003. “Acts of resistance: The Performance of Women’s Grassroots Protest in Peru “ Social Movements Studies, 2(2), 177-190.

Parkin, D., Krause, K., and Alex, G. (Eds). (2013). Therapeutic crises, diversification and mainstreaming. Anthropology and Medicine, 20(3).

Schoenwaelder, K. and Bloemraad, I. (2013). Immigrant and ethnic minority representation in Europe: conceptual challenges and theoretical approaches. West European Politics, 36(3), 564-579.

Shaery, R. and Cavatora, F. (2013). The internet and civil activism in Syria. In P.Aarts and Cavatorta (Eds), Cicil society in Syria and Iran: activism in authoritarian contexts (pp. 119-141). Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers.,,