Best of
Activism

2014

Invincible: The 10 Lies You Learn Growing Up with Domestic Violence, and the Truths to Set You Free


Brian F. Martin - 2014
    Yet, too few people are aware of the profound impact it can have. Invincible seeks to change this lack of awareness and understanding with a compelling look at this important issue, informing and inspiring anyone who grew up living with domestic violence—and those who love them, work with them, teach them, and mentor them. Through powerful first-person stories, including the author’s own experiences, as well as insightful commentary based on the most recent social science and psychology research, Invincible not only offers a deeper understanding of the concerns and challenges of domestic violence, but also provides proven strategies everyone can use to reclaim their lives and futures. What did you learn growing up with domestic violence? Do you know how this has had an impact on your life? How have you dealt with it? Today, are there certain things about yourself that you wish weren’t true? Many of them aren’t. They are lies you learned. Invincible exposes the lies, reveals the truths, and offers the insight and the skills you need to go from feeling and acting: Guilty to Free Resentful to Compassionate Sad to Grateful Angry to Passionate Hopeless to Guided Worthless to Accomplished Fearful to Confident Self-Conscious to Attractive Unloved to Loved The truth is, no obstacle you will ever face can compare to what you went through as a child and have already conquered. The author is donating all net royalties to the Children of Domestic Violence Foundation (CDV).

A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion


Matthieu Ricard - 2014
    Every chicken just wants to be free. Every bear, dog, or mouse experiences sorrow and feels pain as intensely as any of us humans do. In a compelling appeal to reason and human kindness, Matthieu Ricard here takes the arguments from his best-sellers Altruism and Happiness to their logical conclusion: that compassion toward all beings, including our fellow animals, is a moral obligation and the direction toward which any enlightened society must aspire. He chronicles the appalling sufferings of the animals we eat, wear, and use for adornment or "entertainment," and submits every traditional justification for their exploitation to scientific evidence and moral scrutiny. What arises is an unambiguous and powerful ethical imperative for treating all of the animals with whom we share this planet with respect and compassion.

The Case for Reparations


Ta-Nehisi Coates - 2014
    

Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better


Maya Schenwar - 2014
    Through the stories of prisoners and their families, as well as her own family's experience of her sister's incarceration, Schenwar shows how the institution that locks up 2.3 million Americans and decimates poor communities of color is shredding the ties that, if nurtured, could foster real collective safety. The destruction does not end upon exiting the prison walls: the 95 percent of prisoners who are released emerge with even fewer economic opportunities and fewer human connections on the outside than before. Locked Down, Locked Out shows how incarceration takes away the very things that might enable people to build better lives. Looking toward a future beyond imprisonment, Schenwar profiles community-based initiatives that foster antiracist, anticlassist, prohumanity approaches to justice. These programs successfully deal with problems both individual harm and larger social wrongs through connection rather than isolation, moving toward a safer future for all of us."“This book has the power to transform hearts and minds, opening us to new ways of imagining what justice can mean for individuals, families, communities, and our nation as a whole. I turned the last page feeling nothing less than inspired.”–Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow“Maya Schenwar’s stories about prisoners, their families (including her own), and the thoroughly broken punishment system are rescued from any pessimism such narratives might inspire by the author’s brilliant juxtaposition of abolitionist imaginaries and radical political practices.”–Angela Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?“A tour de force! Schenwar has written a must-read, damning account of the twisted philosophy and practice of incarceration…Until society changes its approach toward its ‘offenders,’ until we leaven punishment with forgiveness, reconciliation, and restorative justice, we are all guilty as charged.”—Dennis J. Kucinich, US Congressman (1997–2013) and presidential candidate

Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance


Reggie L. Williams - 2014
    The Reich's political ideology, when mixed with theology of the German Christian movement, turned Jesus into a divine representation of the ideal, racially pure Aryan and allowed race-hate to become part of Germany's religious life. Bonhoeffer provided a Christian response to Nazi atrocities. In this book author Reggie L. Williams follows Bonhoeffer as he defies Germany with Harlem's black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem's churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence--and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Bonhoeffer absorbed the Christianity of the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed rather than joins the oppressors and a theology that challenges the way God can be used to underwrite a union of race and religion. Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus argues that the black American narrative led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the truth that obedience to Jesus requires concrete historical action. This ethic of resistance not only indicted the church of the German Volk, but also continues to shape the nature of Christian discipleship today.

Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change


George Marshall - 2014
    What is the psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall’s search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize–winning psychologists and Texas Tea Party activists; the world’s leading climate scientists and those who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals. What he discovers is that our values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.With engaging stories and drawing on years of his own research, Marshall argues that the answers do not lie in the things that make us different, but rather in what we share: how our human brains are wired—our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind spots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe. Once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can rethink climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, we can halt it if we make it our common purpose and common ground. In the end, Don’t Even Think About It is both about climate change and about the qualities that make us human and how we can deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.

Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline


Malu Halasa - 2014
    Itshowcases the work of over fifty artists and writers whoare challenging the culture of violence in Syria. Theirliterature, poems and songs, cartoons, political postersand photographs document and interpret the momentouschanges that have shifted the frame of reality so drasticallyin Syria.Moving and inspiring, Syria Speaks is testament to thecourage, creativity and imagination of the Syrian people.A unique anthology providing a window into Syrian art andwriting since the uprising. Contributors includeinternationally renowned artists and writers, such asAli Ferzat, Samar Yazbek, Khaled Khalifa and Robin Yassin-Kassab.The book includes 108 colour illustrations.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture


Justin McGuirk - 2014
    From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from.Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Soldier of Change: From the Closet to the Forefront of the Gay Rights Movement


Stephen Snyder-Hill - 2014
    policy on gays serving in the military, was repealed in September 2011, soldier Stephen Snyder-Hill (then Captain Hill) was serving in Iraq. Having endured years of this policy, which passively encouraged a culture of fear and secrecy for gay soldiers, Snyder-Hill submitted a video to a Republican primary debate (held two days after the repeal). In the video he asked for the Republicans’ thoughts regarding the repeal and their plans, if any, to extend spousal benefits to legally married gay and lesbian soldiers. His video was booed by the audience on national television. Soldier of Change captures not only the media frenzy that followed that moment, placing Snyder-Hill at the forefront of this modern civil rights movement, but also his twenty-year journey as a gay man in the army: from self-loathing to self-acceptance, to the most important battle of his life–protecting the disenfranchised. Since that time, Snyder-Hill has traveled the country with his husband, giving interviews on major news networks and speaking at universities, community centers, and pride parades, a champion of LGBT equality.

The Oxen at the Intersection: A Collision (or, Bill and Lou Must Die: A Real-Life Murder Mystery from the Green Mountains of Vermont)


pattrice jones - 2014
    What transpired after this simple offer was a catastrophe of miscommunication, misdirection, and misinterpretations, as the college dug in its heels, activists piled on, and social media erupted.Part true-crime mystery, part on-the-ground reportage, and part sociocultural critique, The Oxen at the Intersection is a brilliant unearthing of the assumptions, preconceptions, and biases that led all concerned with the lives and deaths of these two animals to fail to achieve their ends. How and why the threads of this story unspooled, as jones reveals, raises profound questions—most particularly about how ideas rooted in history, race, gender, region, and speciesism intersect and complicate strategy and activism, and their desired outcomes. In the end, notes jones, we must always ask, Where’s the body?

Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists


Janine Myung Ja - 2014
    Along with adopted people, this collection also includes the voices of mothers and a father from the Baby Scoop Era, a modern-day mother who almost lost her child to adoption, and ends with the experience of an adoption investigator from Against Child Trafficking. These stories are usually abandoned by the very industry that professes to work for the “best interest of children,” “child protection,” and for families. However, according to adopted people who were scattered across nations as children, these represent typical human rights issues that have been ignored for too long. For many years, adopted people have just dealt with such matters alone, not knowing that all of us—as a community—have a great deal in common. Contributors: Casper Andersen, Lily Arthur, Trace DeMeyer, Peter Dodds, Arun Dohle, Darelle Duncan, Erica Gehringer, Jeffrey Hancock, Bob Honecker, Cameron Horn, Tobias Hubinette, Sunny Jo Johnsen, Kristina Laine, Lakshmi, Tinan Leroy, Georgiana A. Macavei, Marion McMillan, Khara Nine, Colette Noonan, Cryptic Omega, Vanessa Pearce, Michael Allen Potter, Paul Redmond, Lucy Sheen, Joe Soll, Vance Twins and Daniel Ibn Zayd.

Undocumented: The Architecture Of Migrant Detention


Tings Chak - 2014
    This book explores migrant detention centres, a global industry and the fastest growing incarceration sector in North America's prison industrial complex, and questions the role of architectural design in the control and management of migrants in such spaces. Using the conventional architectural tools of representation, the book draws from the shadows the silenced voices of those who are detained and it confronts the anonymous individuals who design spaces of confinement.

What If I Say the Wrong Thing?: 25 Habits for Culturally Effective People


Vernā Myers - 2014
    Written to make this information bite-size and accessible, you'll find quick answers to typical What should I do? questions, like: What if I say the wrong thing, what should I do? What if I am work and someone makes a sexist joke, what should I say? Purchase copies for everyone at your organization to make sure everyone knows the culturally effective way to approach diversity situations. With this book they can be prepared and practiced at moving diversity forward!

The Ring of Fire Anthology


E.T. Russian - 2014
    Ring of Fire is honest, engaging, and ahead of its time.Through black and white ink drawings, comics, linoleum block print portraits, essays, interviews and erotica, this collection explores the intersections of art, bodies, healthcare, ability, gender, race, community, class, healing and the politics of work.Alternately emotional and erotic, funny and political, Ring of Fire tells the author's personal story, and captures the work and words of various artists and leaders from disability culture and history. A young activist steeped in the cultures of queer and punk, Russian embraced a cultural identity of disability while writing Ring of Fire. Years later, Russian examines what it means to work in healthcare in the United States.

Blue Hope: Exploring and Caring for Earth's Magnificent Ocean


Sylvia A. Earle - 2014
    Earle, international advocate for the ocean, set out on a new mission: "To create a campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, Hope Spots large enough to save and restore the ocean - the blue heart of the planet." This lavishly illustrated volume describes the renowned oceanographer's wish-in-progress, the development of a massive effort called Mission blue to take care of our living ocean. Blue Hope captures the author's compelling story, intertwined with the beauty of the ocean, the splendor of its wildlife, the issues it faces, and the resilience of its resources.

Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era


Dan Berger - 2014
    Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux. Showing that the prison was a central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s through the 1980s, Berger traces the dynamic and dramatic history of this political struggle. The prison shaped the rise and spread of black activism, from civil rights demonstrators willfully risking arrests to the many current and former prisoners that built or joined organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Grounded in extensive research, Berger engagingly demonstrates that such organizing made prison walls porous and influenced generations of activists that followed.

Malala, a Brave Girl from Pakistan/Iqbal, a Brave Boy from Pakistan: Two Stories of Bravery


Jeanette Winter - 2014
    Two stories of bravery in one beautiful book!Meet two brave young heroes of Pakistan who stood up for the right to freedom and education in this inspirational nonfiction picture book from acclaimed author-illustrator Jeanette Winter.One country: Pakistan. Two children: Iqbal Masih and Malala Yousafzai. Each was unafraid to speak out. He, against inhumane child slavery in the carpet trade. She, for the right of girls to attend school. Both were shot by those who disagreed with them—he in 1995, she in 2012. Iqbal was killed instantly; Malala miraculously survived and continues to speak out around the world.The stories of these two courageous children whose bravery transcended their youth are an inspiration to all.

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder


Chad Wriglesworth - 2014
    He had just published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, Wendell Berry left New York City for farmland in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived with his wife. Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture had yet to meet, but they knew each other’s work and soon began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor the impact they would have on one another.They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, bringing out the best in each other as they grappled with faith and reason, discussed home and family, worried over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and shared the details of the lives they’d chosen with their wives and children. None can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.

Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith


Alethia Jones - 2014
    Her four decades of grassroots activism forged collaborations that introduced the idea that oppression must be fought on a variety of fronts simultaneously, including gender, race, class, and sexuality. By combining hard-to-find historical documents with new unpublished interviews with fellow activists, this book uncovers the deep roots of today's identity politics and intersectionality and serves as an essential primer for practicing solidarity and resistance.

A Hero for High Times: A Younger Reader’s Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New-Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 1956–1994


Ian Marchant - 2014
    It's also the story of his times, and the ideas that shaped him. It's a story of why you know your birth sign, why you have friends called Willow, why sex and drugs and rock’n’roll once mattered more than money, why dance music stopped the New-Age Travellers from travelling, and why you need to think twice before taking the brown acid.It's the story of the hippies for those who weren't there – for Younger Readers who've never heard of the Aldermaston marches, Oz, the Angry Brigade, the Divine Light Mission, Sniffin' Glue, Operation Julie, John Seymour, John Michell, Greenham Common, the Battle of the Beanfield, but who want to understand their grandparents’ stories of turning on, tuning in and not quite dropping out before they are gone for ever. It's for Younger Readers who want to know how to build a bender, make poppy tea, and throw the I-Ching.And it's a story of friendship between two men, one who did things, and one who thought about things, between theory and practice, between a hippie and a punk, between two gentlemen, no longer in the first flush of youth, who still believe in love.

A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty


Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua - 2014
    Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright

Seven New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook boxed set


T.J. DemaChris Abani - 2014
    Publication is made possible through Slapering Hol Press, in association with APBF and the literary journal Prairie Schooner, with support from The Poetry Foundation.The chapbook contains:• Mandible by TJ Dema• The Cartographer of Water by Clifton Gachagua• Carnaval by Tsitsi Jaji• The Second Republic by Nick Makoha• Ordinary Heaven by Ladan Osman• Our Men Do Not Belong To Us by Wasan Shire• Otherwise Everything Goes On by Len Verwey

Life as Activism: June Jordan's Writings from The Progressive


June Jordan - 2014
    Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet and UC Berkeley professor who is celebrated as a great human rights activist and social critic. Through her work, she taught a concept of "life as activism," based on inclusiveness, consistency, honesty, and identification with the oppressed. Far from being a purely idealistic and unsustainable approach to life, Jordan demonstrated that "life as activism" can be a way of engaging with the world that is accessible to all people who are committed to social justice. The writings collected here can be read as a road map to such a life of activism. These columns provide a critical study of important issues from the end of the twentieth century, as well as a clear illustration of the intersections of many forms of injustice and oppression, celebrating a movement away from single-issue politics to a far-reaching activism. The publisher hopes that through this collection Jordan's work will become more widely known.

Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures


Betsy Leondar-Wright - 2014
    But in searching for solutions to these predictable and intractable troubles, progressive social movement groups overlook class culture differences. In Missing Class, Betsy Leondar-Wright uses a class-focused lens to show that members with different class life experiences tend to approach these problems differently. This perspective enables readers to envision new solutions that draw on the strengths of all class cultures to form the basis of stronger cross-class and multiracial movements.The first comprehensive empirical study of US activist class cultures, Missing Class looks at class dynamics in 25 groups that span the gamut of social movement organizations in the United States today, including the labor movement, grassroots community organizing, and groups working on global causes in the anarchist and progressive traditions. Leondar-Wright applies Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and habitus to four class trajectories: lifelong working-class and poor; lifelong professional middle class; voluntarily downwardly mobile; and upwardly mobile.Compellingly written for both activists and social scientists, this book describes class differences in paths to activism, attitudes toward leadership, methods of conflict resolution, ways of using language, diversity practices, use of humor, methods of recruiting, and group process preferences. Too often, we miss class. Missing Class makes a persuasive case that seeing class culture differences could enable activists to strengthen their own groups and build more durable cross-class alliances for social justice.

Dare We Speak of Hope?: Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics


Allan Aubrey Boesak - 2014
    But what happens when that hope disappoints? Can it be salvaged? What is the relationship between faith, hope, and politics?In this book Allan Boesak meditates on what it really means to hope in light of present political realities and growing human pain. He argues that hope comes to life only when we truly face reality in the struggle for justice, dignity, and the life of the earth. Dare We Speak of Hope? is a critical, provocative, prophetic -- and, above all, hopeful -- book.

Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice


Jessica Gordon Nembhard - 2014
    Not since W. E. B. Du Bois's 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes' Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing.To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops' articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation's history.

Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist


Jacqueline Houtman - 2014
    – Bayard RustinTo many, the Civil Rights Movement brings to mind protests, marches, boycotts, and freedom rides. They often think of people like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. They seldom think of Bayard Rustin.Raised by his Quaker grandmother to believe in the value of every human being, Bayard made trouble where ever he saw injustice. As a teenager, he was arrested for sitting in the whites only section of a theater. More arrests followed, for protesting against segregation, discrimination, and war. His belief in nonviolent action as a means for social change gave him a guiding vision for the Civil Rights Movement, which he used to mentor the young Martin Luther King, Jr. When A. Philip Randolph needed the best organizer on the planet, he turned to Bayard Rustin to bring 250,000 people to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.Illustrated with over sixty photos, this book is the product of a unique collaboration between three authors: Bayard’s partner of ten years, a professor of religious studies, and a children’s book author. Though he is largely ignored in history books, Bayard’s ideas and actions will inspire today’s young (and not-so-young) readers to be angelic troublemakers.

Alice Paul: Claiming Power


J.D. Zahniser - 2014
    Raised by Quaker parents in Moorestown, New Jersey, she would become a passionate and outspoken leader of the woman suffrage movement. In 1913, she reinvigorated the American campaign for a constitutional suffrage amendment and, in the next seven years, dominated that campaign and drove it to victory with bold, controversial action-wedding courage with resourcefulness and self-mastery.This riveting account of Paul's early years and suffrage activism offers fresh insight into her private persona and public image, examining for the first time the sources of Paul's ambition and the growth of her political consciousness. Though many historians regard her Quaker upbringing as thegreatest influence in her commitment to women's rights, J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry explore the ways in which her political zeal developed out of years of education, as well as from her early involvement with British suffragists Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. These two women helped to honePaul's instincts and skills, which equipped her for later dealings with two important political adversaries, Woodrow Wilson and rival suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt.Using oral history interviews and the rich trove of Paul's correspondence, Zahniser and Fry substantially revise our understanding Paul's role in the suffrage movement. This compelling biography analyzes Paul's charisma and leadership qualities, sheds new light on her life and work, and is essentialreading for anyone interested in the woman suffrage movement, particularly as the American centennial of the women's vote approaches.

The Ethics of Captivity


Lori Gruen - 2014
    Surprisingly, despite the rich ethical questions it raises, very little philosophical attention has been paid to questions raised by captivity. Though conditions of captivity vary widely for humans and for other animals, there are common ethical themes that imprisonment raises, including the value of liberty, the nature of autonomy, the meaning of dignity, and the impact of routine confinement on physical and psychological well-being. This volume brings together scholars, scientists, and sanctuary workers to address in fifteen new essays the ethical issues captivity raises. Section One contains chapters written by those with expert knowledge about particular conditions of captivity and includes discussion of how captivity is experienced by dogs, whales and dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees, rabbits, formerly farmed animals, and human prisoners. Section Two contains chapters by philosophers and social theorists that reflect on the social, political, and ethical issues raised by captivity, including discussions about confinement, domestication, captive breeding for conservation, the work of moral repair, dignity and an ethics of sight, and the role that coercion plays.

Public Battles, Private Wars


Laura Wilkinson - 2014
    Miner's wife Mandy is stuck in a rut. At twenty-three, and trapped by domesticity, her future looks set and she wants more from life. Husband Rob is a good-looking drinker, content to spend his days in the small town where they've always lived - where Mandy can't do anything other than bake cakes and raise her children. When Mandy's childhood friend - beautiful, clever Ruth - and Ruth's Falklands war hero husband, Dan, return to town, their homecoming is shrouded in mystery. Like in their schooldays, Mandy looks to Ruth for inspiration - but Ruth isn't all she appears. As conflict with the Coal Board turns into war, the men come out on strike. The community and its whole way of life is threatened. Mandy abandons her dreams of liberation from the kitchen sink and joins a support group. As the strike rumbles on, relationships are pushed to the brink, and Mandy finds out just who she is - and who her true friends are.

For the Love of Lemurs: My Life in the Wilds of Madagascar


Patricia Chapple Wright - 2014
    Not only did Wright discover that the primate still existed but that it lived alongside a completely new species. What followed was a love affair with an animal and a country that continues to this day. In this frank and enchanting sequel to High Moon Over the Amazon, Wright recounts the many challenges she faced, including separation from her daughter, a tempestuous romance with a fellow scientist, and political upheaval that threatens her dream of establishing a national park to ensure the safety of her precious lemurs. But in the end, her tenacity, daring, and passion for this endangered primate lead to extraordinary scientific breakthroughs and help bring the animal back from the brink of extinction.

Accomplices Not Allies


Anonymous - 2014
    This zine calls instead for "accomplices", those whose by-side-side collaboration in the necessary crimes of decolonisation are fundamentally different from the patronising tactics of "allies" who perpetuate colonial models while decrying colonialism. Ends with the image of a burning car and a call for direct action, hence its anonymity.

The Accidental Activist


Matt Ball - 2014
    Some have their life shaped by chance, quirks of timing, and strange coincidences. And an unwillingness—or simple inability—to fully ignore the horrors perpetrated on animals today. Since Matt Ball learned of factory farms well over a quarter century ago, his journey has been anything but linear. Instead, his evolution has been fraught with denial, regression, conflicts, and failures. Matt’s evolution shows that not every activist is a confident extrovert with all the answers. His struggles—often publicly played out in written form, in newsletters, mailings, blogs—have influenced, directly and indirectly, countless individuals. Even though accidental and reluctant, the hard-learned but ultimately pragmatic lessons Matt shares in this book are changing the world. Having learned from years of mistakes, his insights can help others be effective and, hopefully, happier as well. As Peter Singer notes, “A new future is in sight, one that Matt, Vegan Outreach, and other advocates are hard at work creating.” This book can help each of us be a part of bringing about this new future.

More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing


Jesse Hagopian - 2014
    In fact, the “reformers” today find themselves facing the largest revolt in US history against high-stakes, standardized testing.More Than a Score is a collection of essays, poems, speeches, and interviews—accounts of personal courage and trenchant insights—from frontline fighters who are defying the corporate education reformers, often at great personal and professional risk, and fueling a national movement to reclaim and transform public education.Along with the voices of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and grassroots education activists, the book features renowned education researchers and advocates, including Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Karen Lewis, Carol Burris, and Mark Naison.

Here We Stand: Women Changing the World


Helena Earnshaw - 2014
    A fascinating and unique anthology about contemporary women campaigners and how they were changed by the process of changing the world.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible


Charles E. Cobb Jr. - 2014
    at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal.”Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement’s success.Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.

Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation


William J. Barber II - 2014
    Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation shares the theological foundation for the Moral Monday movement, serving as a proclamation of a new American movement seeking equal treatment and opportunity for all regardless of economic status, sexual preference, belief, race, geography, and any other discriminatory bases. The book will also serve as a model for other movements across the country and around the world using North Carolina as a case study, providing useful, practical tips about grassroots organizing and transformative leadership.

Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews


Stephen Drury Smith - 2014
    He spoke with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. The large collection of audiotapes of his conversations, however, remained unknown to the public until rediscovered by scholars in recent years. A major contribution in their own right to our understanding of the struggle for civil rights, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents with pressing relevance today.Published to coincide with a national radio documentary from American RadioWorks®, Free All Along brings to life the voices of America’s civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals.

Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy (Voice of Witness)


Corinne Goria - 2014
    These narrators � including phone manufacturers in China, copper miners in Zambia, garment workers in Bangladesh, and farmers around the world � reveal the secret history of the things we buy, including lives and communities devastated by low wages, environmental degradation, and political repression. Sweeping in scope and rich in detail, these stories capture the interconnectivity of all people struggling to support themselves and their families. Narrators include Kalpona, a leading Bangladeshi labor organizer who led her first strike at 15; Han, who, as a teenager, began assembling circuit boards for an international electronics company based in Seoul; Albert, a copper miner in Zambia who, during a wage protest, was shot by representatives of the Chinese-owned mining company that he worked for; and Sanjay, who grew up in the shadow of the Bhopal chemical disaster, one of the worst industrial accidents in history.

American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century


Leilah Danielson - 2014
    Best known for his role in the labor movement of the 1930s and his leadership of the peace movement in the postwar era, Muste was one of the most charismatic figures of the American left in his time. Had he written the story of his life, it would also have been the story of social and political struggles in the United States during the twentieth century.In American Gandhi, Leilah Danielson establishes Muste's distinctive activism as the work of a prophet and a pragmatist. Muste warned that the revolutionary dogmatism of the Communist Party would prove a dead end, understood the moral significance of racial equality, argued early in the Cold War that American pacifists should not pick a side, and presaged the spiritual alienation of the New Left from the liberal establishment. At the same time, Muste was committed to grounding theory in practice and the individual in community. His open, pragmatic approach fostered some of the most creative and remarkable innovations in progressive thought and practice in the twentieth century, including the adaptation of Gandhian nonviolence for American concerns and conditions.A biography of Muste's evolving political and religious views, American Gandhi also charts the rise and fall of American progressivism over the course of the twentieth century and offers the possibility of its renewal in the twenty-first.

Unfree Labour?: Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada


Aziz Choudry - 2014
    Is unfree labour only an historical phenomenon, or does this concept accurately capture the conditions and experiences of many migrant and immigrant workers in Canada today? This unique collection foregrounds contemporary organizing strategies and models for labour and migration justice, alongside an in-depth examination of racialized neoliberal

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice


Stephen D'Arcy - 2014
    Tar sands “development” comes with an enormous environmental and human cost. But tar sands opponents—fighting a powerful international industry—are likened to terrorists; government environmental scientists are muzzled; and public hearings are concealed and rushed. Yet, despite the formidable political and economic power behind the tar sands, many opponents are actively building international networks of resistance, challenging pipeline plans while resisting threats to Indigenous sovereignty and democratic participation. Including leading voices involved in the struggle against the tar sands, A Line in the Tar Sands offers a critical analysis of the impact of the tar sands and the challenges opponents face in their efforts to organize effective resistance. Contributors include Angela Carter, Bill McKibben, Brian Tokar, Christine Leclerc, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Crystal Lameman, Dave Vasey, Emily Coats, Eriel Deranger, Greg Albo, Jeremy Brecher, Jess Worth, Jesse Cardinal, Joshua Kahn Russell, Lilian Yap, Linda Capato, Macdonald Stainsby, Martin Lukacs, Matt Leonard, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Naomi Klein, Rae Breaux, Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Rex Weyler, Ryan Katz-Rosene, Sâkihitowin Awâsis, Sonia Grant, Stephen D’Arcy, Toban Black, Tony Weis, Tyler McCreary, Winona LaDuke, and Yves Engler.

Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America


Robyn Muncy - 2014
    As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, she shaped the founding legislation of the U.S. welfare state and generated the national conversation about health-care policy that Americans are still having today. In this gripping biography, Robyn Muncy offers Roche's persistent progressivism as evidence for surprising continuities among the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society.Muncy explains that Roche became the second-highest-ranking woman in the New Deal government after running a Colorado coal company in partnership with coal miners themselves. Once in office, Roche developed a national health plan that was stymied by World War II but enacted piecemeal during the postwar period, culminating in Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. By then, Roche directed the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund, an initiative aimed at bolstering the labor movement, advancing managed health care, and reorganizing medicine to facilitate national health insurance, one of Roche's unrealized dreams.In Relentless Reformer, Muncy uses Roche's dramatic life story--from her stint as Denver's first policewoman in 1912 to her fight against a murderous labor union official in 1972--as a unique vantage point from which to examine the challenges that women have faced in public life and to reassess the meaning and trajectory of progressive reform.

Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education


Ali Michael - 2014
    Even just asking questions about race can be scary, because we are afraid of what our questions might reveal about our ignorance or bias. Raising Race Questions invites teachers to use inquiry as a way to develop sustained engagement with challenging racial questions and to do so in community so that they learn how common their questions actually are. It lays out both a process for getting to questions that lead to growth and change, as well as a vision for where engagement with race questions might lead. Race questions are not meant to lead us into a quagmire of guilt, discomfort, or isolation. Sustained race inquiry is meant to lead to antiracist classrooms, positive racial identities, and a restoration of the wholeness of spirit and community that racism undermines.Book Features: New insights on race and equity in education, including the idea that a multicultural curriculum is not sufficient for building an antiracist classroom. Case studies of expert and experienced White teachers who still have questions about race. Approaches for talking about race in the K-12 classroom. Strategies for facilitating race conversations among adults. A variety of different resources useful in the teacher inquiry groups described in the book. Research with teachers, not on teachers, including written responses from each teacher whose classroom is featured in the book.

Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation


Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - 2014
    

The Vandana Shiva Reader


Vandana Shiva - 2014
    Her awareness of the complex connections among economy and nature and culture preserves her from oversimplification. So does her understanding of the importance of diversity.""-Wendell Berry, from the foreword Motivated by agricultural devastation in her home country of India, Vandana Shiva became one of the world's most influential and highly acclaimed environmental and antiglobalization activists. Her groundbreaking research h

The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century


Steven Best - 2014
    Steven Best contextualizes the 21st century as the decisive moment in human history wherein our actions will determine whether the future will be merely burdensome or catastrophic. Overcoming this crisis demands a new politics of total liberation that unites the disparate movements for human, animal, and earth liberation. Avoiding bravado or false optimism, Best questions humanity's ability to rise to the occasion, and dares to imagine a "world without us."

One Kind Word: Women Share Their Abortion Stories


Kathryn Palmateer - 2014
    Women who have had abortions are our mothers, sisters, grandmothers, lovers, friends, neighbours, doctors, teachers, and politicians.One Kind Word features forewords by prominent feminist and pro-choice activist Judy Rebick, as well as Jillian Bardsley of Medical Students for Choice.

Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health


Joanna Kempner - 2014
    Vomiting. Hours and days spent lying in the dark. Migraine is an extraordinarily common, disabling, and painful disorder that affects over 36 million Americans and costs the US economy at least $32 billion per year. Nevertheless, it is frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized. In Not Tonight, Joanna Kempner argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Because the symptoms that accompany headache disorders—like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound—lack an objective marker of distress that can confirm their existence, doctors rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are. Kempner shows how this problem plays out in the history of migraine, from nineteenth-century formulations of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectual men and hysterical women to the influential concept of “migraine personality” in the 1940s, in which women with migraine were described as uptight neurotics who withheld sex, to contemporary depictions of people with highly sensitive “migraine brains.” Not Tonight casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose suffering we legitimate, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, and how knowledge about disease is produced.

Changing the Game: Animal Liberation in the Twenty-First Century


Norm Phelps - 2014
    His new book collects his recent writings on this subject, as well as offers in print for the first time a fully revised and updated version of the e-book he published with Lantern in 2013 (978-1-59056-379-3). Phelps argues that faced with the overwhelming wealth and power of the animal exploitation industries, animal activists are like David trying to stand up to Goliath. But rather than following the unsuccessful strategies of the past, Phelps proposes that we change the game by adopting David's strategy of refusing to play by Goliath's rules. Additional essays explore class and race in animal advocacy, the place of public policy vs. private morality in creating social change, and the unyielding barrier of human exceptionalism. Trenchant, wise, and deeply committed to the reduction of suffering and the liberation of animals, Changing the Game is sure to offer animal advocates much food for thought as the movement charts a way forward for all sentient beings.

Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978


Jenna M. Loyd - 2014
    Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women’s movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right. For a time—with President Nixon, big business, and organized labor in agreement on national health insurance—even universal health care seemed a real possibility.Health Rights Are Civil Rights documents what many Los Angeles activists recognized: that militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending, the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social programs. Recapturing a little-known current of the era’s activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war making were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice—a vision that goes unanswered still today.

Dutch Racism


Philomena Essed - 2014
    The approach is unique, not comparative but relational, in unraveling the legacy of racism in the Netherlands and the (former) colonies. Authors contribute to identifying the complex ways in which racism operates in and beyond the national borders, shaped by European and global influences, and intersecting with other systems of domination. Contrary to common sense beliefs it appears that old-fashioned biological notions of "race" never disappeared. At the same time the Netherlands echoes, if not leads, a wider European trend, where offensive statements about Muslims are an everyday phenomenon.Dutch Racism challenges readers to question what happens when the moral rejection of racism looses ground. The volume captures the layered nature of Dutch racism through a plurality of registers, methods, and disciplinary approaches: from sociology and history to literary analysis, art history and psychoanalysis, all different elements competing for relevance, truth value, and explanatory power. This range of voices and vision offers illuminating insights in the two closely related questions that organize this book: what factors contribute to the complexity of Dutch racism? And why is the concept of racism so intensely contested? The volume will speak to audiences across the humanities and social sciences and can be used as textbook in undergraduate as well as graduate courses.

The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity


Max Haiven - 2014
    Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our physical and temporal limits, it also allows us to envision the future, individually and collectively. The radical imagination, then, is that spark of difference, desire, and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change. Yet what precisely is the imagination and what might make it 'radical'? How can it be fostered and cultivated? How can it be studied and what are the possibilities and risks of doing so?This book seeks to answer these questions at a crucial time. As we enter into a new cycle of struggles scholar-activists Khasnabish and Haiven explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times.A lively, accessible and timely intervention that breaks new ground in speaking to radical politics, social research, social change, and the collective visions that inspire them.

Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss


Colin B. Burke - 2014
    In the 1890s, the idealistic American Herbert Haviland Field established the Concilium Bibliographicum, a Switzerland-based science information service that sent millions of index cards to American and European scientists. Field's radical new idea was to index major ideas rather than books or documents. In his struggle to create and maintain his system, Field became entangled with nationalistic struggles over the control of science information, the new system of American philanthropy (powered by millionaires), the politics of an emerging American professional science, and in the efforts of another information visionary, Paul Otlet, to create a pre-digital worldwide database for all subjects.World War I shuttered the Concilium, and postwar efforts to revive it failed. Field himself died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Burke carries the story into the next generation, however, describing the astonishingly varied career of Field's son, Noel, who became a diplomat, an information source for Soviet intelligence (as was his friend Alger Hiss), a secret World War II informant for Allen Dulles, and a prisoner of Stalin. Along the way, Burke touches on a range of topics, including the new entrepreneurial university, Soviet espionage in America, and further efforts to classify knowledge.

Campaign Inc.: How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White House


Henry F. De Sio. Jr. - 2014
    Campaign Inc. is the story of how leadership and organization propelled Barack Obama to the White House. As the chief operating officer of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Henry F. De Sio, Jr., was positioned to view this historic campaign as few others could. In this fascinating behind-the-scenes account, he whisks readers into Obama’s national election headquarters in Chicago to glimpse the decision-making processes and myriad details critical to running a successful and innovative presidential campaign. From the campaign’s early chaos to the jubilation and drama of winning the Iowa caucus, to the drawn-out Democratic nomination process, to Obama’s eventual election as president of the United States, De Sio guides readers through the challenges faced by the Obama for America campaign in its brief twenty-one-month lifespan. De Sio shows readers that Obama himself was direct about his vision for the campaign when he instructed his staff to “run it like a business.” Thus, this is less the story of Barack Obama, candidate, and more the story of Barack Obama, CEO. Because campaigns are launched from scratch during every election cycle, they are the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. In the course of the election, the Obama campaign scaled up from a scrappy start-up to a nearly $1 billion operation, becoming a hothouse environment on which the glare of the media spotlight was permanently trained.Campaign Inc. allows readers to peek behind the curtain at the underdog organization that brought down the Clinton campaign and later went on to defeat the Republican machine, while offering lessons in leadership and organization to innovators, executives, and entrepreneurs.

Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States


Christopher Vials - 2014
    Traversing the Popular Front of the 1930s, the struggle against McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Black Power movement of the 1960s, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s, Haunted by Hitler highlights the value of "antifascist" cultural politics, showing how it helped to frame the national discourse. Christopher Vials examines the ways in which anxieties about fascism in the United States have been expressed in the public sphere, through American television shows, Off-Broadway theater, party newspapers, bestselling works of history, journalism, popular sociology, political theory, and other media. He argues that twentieth-century liberals and leftists were more deeply unsettled by the problem of fascism than those at the center or the right and that they tirelessly and often successfully worked to counter America's fascist equivalents.

The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent


Piya Chatterjee - 2014
    The Imperial University brings together scholars, including some who have been targeted for their open criticism of American foreign policy and settler colonialism, to explore the policing of knowledge by explicitly linking the academy to the broader politics of militarism, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism that define the contemporary imperial state.The contributors to this book argue that “academic freedom” is not a sufficient response to the crisis of intellectual repression. Instead, they contend that battles fought over academic containment must be understood in light of the academy’s relationship to U.S. expansionism and global capital. Based on multidisciplinary research, autobiographical accounts, and even performance scripts, this urgent analysis offers sobering insights into such varied manifestations of “the imperial university” as CIA recruitment at black and Latino colleges, the connections between universities and civilian and military prisons, and the gender and sexual politics of academic repression.Contributors: Thomas Abowd, Tufts U; Victor Bascara, UCLA; Dana Collins, California State U, Fullerton; Nicholas De Genova; Ricardo Dominguez, UC San Diego; Sylvanna Falcón, UC Santa Cruz; Farah Godrej, UC Riverside; Roberto J. Gonzalez, San Jose State U; Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Sharmila Lodhia, Santa Clara U; Julia C. Oparah, Mills College; Vijay Prashad, Trinity College; Jasbir Puar, Rutgers U; Laura Pulido, U of Southern California; Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, California State U, Long Beach; Steven Salaita, Virginia Tech; Molly Talcott, California State U, Los Angeles.

Getting Up for the People: The Visual Revolution of ASAR-Oaxaca


ASARO Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca - 2014
    Part of a long tradition of socially conscious Mexican art, ASARO gives respect to Mexican national icons; but their themes are also global, entering contemporary debates on issues of corporate greed, genetically modified organisms, violence against women, and abuses of natural resources. This book interjects into the growing body of work on street art and social justice—not just ASARO’s art, but also their collective success in influencing political change and improved social infrastructure, particularly in educational outreach. It is a visual tour de force and a success story that embraces and shares the power of art and diversity in our societies.

Torture, Power, and Law


David Luban - 2014
    Philosopher and legal ethicist David Luban reflects on this contentious topic in a powerful sequence of essays including two new and previously unpublished pieces. He analyzes the trade-offs between security and human rights, as well as the connection between torture, humiliation, and human dignity, the fallacy of using ticking bomb scenarios in debates about torture, and the ethics of government lawyers. The book develops an illuminating and novel conception of torture as the use of pain and suffering to communicate absolute dominance over the victim. Factually stimulating and legally informed, this volume provides the clearest analysis to date of the torture debate. It brings the story up to date by discussing the Obama administration's failure to hold torturers accountable.

Downwind: A People's History of the Nuclear West


Sarah Alisabeth Fox - 2014
                   Sarah Alisabeth Fox interviews residents of the Great Basin region affected by environmental contamination from the uranium industry and nuclear testing fallout. Those residents tell tales of communities ravaged by cancer epidemics, farmers and ranchers economically ruined by massive crop and animal deaths, and Native miners working in dangerous conditions without proper safety equipment so that the government could surreptitiously study the effects of radiation on humans. In chilling detail, Downwind brings to light the stories and concerns of these groups whose voices have been silenced and marginalized for decades in the name of “patriotism” and “national security.” With the renewed boom in mining in the American West, Fox’s look at this hidden history, unearthed from years of field interviews, archival research, and epidemiological studies, is a must-read for every American concerned about the fate of our western lands and communities.

A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South


Audrey Thomas McCluskey - 2014
    From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other's successes and learned from each other's struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women's own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood's legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.

A Feminist Voyage through International Relations (Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations)


J. Ann Tickner - 2014
    Ann Tickner is ranked among the most influential scholars of international relations. As one of the founders of the field of feminist international relations, she is also among the most pioneering. In many ways her academic career has traced the development of the feminist subfield of IR, and it is no overstatement to say that the field today would look much different without her groundbreaking contributions.A Feminist Voyage through International Relations provides a compendium of Tickner's work as a feminist IR scholar, from the late 1980s through today. The book addresses the issue of methodology in feminist IR and the continuing challenge from traditional IR scholars that feminists don't perform legitimate scientific research. Tickner introduces and contextualizes her previous writings with new essays that trace her intellectual development as a feminist scholar. The chapters consider the introduction of women and gender into the conversation about IR, as well as feminist methodological interventions and conversations with the IR mainstream. The final section of the book includes some of Tickner's later writings on topics including race, imperialism, and religion. She ends with thoughts on the present currents of feminist IR and its place within the wider discipline.Given the way that her career has mirrored the evolution of the subfield, Tickner's book provides a methodological and epistemological story of feminist interventions in IR and a thoughtful reflection on where the field is headed in the future.

The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory


Patricia MacCormack - 2014
    Featuring contributions from leading academics, lawyers, artists and activists, the book examines key issues such as: - How "compassion" for animals reinforces ideas of what distinguishes human beings from other animals. - How speciesism and human centricity are built into the legal system. - How individualist subjectivity works in relation to animals who may not think of themselves in the same way. - How any consideration of animal others must involve a radical deconstruction of our very notion of the "human." - How art, philosophy and literature can both avoid speciesism and deliver the human from subjectivity.This volume is a unique project which stands at the cutting edge of both animal rights philosophies and posthuman/artistic/abstract philosophies of identity. It will be of great interest to undergraduates and researchers in philosophy, ethics, particularly continental philosophy, critical theory and cultural studies."

House Keys Not Handcuffs: Homeless Organizing, Art and Politics in San Francisco and Beyond


Paul Boden, Art Hazelwood, Bob Prentice - 2014
    Its purpose is not only to distill the lessons we have learned, but to encourage others to document and reflect on their own experiences in the hope that we can collectively contribute to a stronger, more broadly-based movement.

Fire the Cops!: Essays, Lectures, and Journalism


Kristian Williams - 2014
    these subjects and more are examined in this collection of essays by veteran activist Kristian Williams, released to mark ten years since the first publication of his book Our Enemies in Blue in 2004. In section one, focusing in on police murders in Portland, Seattle, and Oakland, Fire the Cops! examines the relationship between working-class communities (predominantly Black) and the police, showing how police violence and impunity function to buttress the power of the State, and arguing that the left should recognize the political content of much of the violence directed against police.Next, in section two, Williams traces the history of the sometimes confusing relationship between the police and organized labor, from the age of the Pinkertons to the much publicized involvement of police in the protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in 2011, and varied police responses to the Occupy movement around the same time. Addressing claims that "police are workers too," Williams shows how any instances of police acting in solidarity with the working class have been atypical, inconsistent, and fleeting at best.By far the most in-depth section of Fire the Cops! is the third section, a study of the role of police in counterinsurgency operations. Drawing on a range of sources, including activist reports and the U.S. Army's Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, Williams shows how, from "anti-gang" operations to "community policing," military theories of repression are increasingly being applied in oppressed communities across the United States.Finally, in the concluding section, Fire the Cops! takes on some of the questions facing those of us engaged in copwatch activities, as well as the position that the police should be abolished, not reformed. Here, Williams maps out some of the conclusions this practice and position imply for our communities and movements, both today and tomorrow.Fire the Cops! is a collection of several essays written in the decade following the publication of Our Enemies in Blue, years in which Williams was heavily involved in the Rose City Copwatch organization in Portland. This book can be read as a supplement to Our Enemies in Blue, or on its own, as a series of attempts to apply historical lessons to circumstances as they unfold.Including both reports from the frontlines and reconnaissance into the plans and practices of our opponents, Fire the Cops! is intended to help inform future critique, and further struggle.Fire the Cops! includes several photographs by Bette Lee, documenting protests against the police in Portland, Oregon, during the years these essays were being written.