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In this critique of globalization, Burbach (director of the Center for the Study of the Americas) asserts that institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, and the transnational corporations are intent upon exercising a new hegemony over our lives while the role of the traditional nation state is transformed. He builds his case by showing how a group of high-tech robber barons at the center of this power shift dominate the information age and exploit the technologies of globalization for their own narrow interests. Drawing on contemporary historical experiences, he discusses the emergence of an array of movements comprising the marginalized, the dispossessed, and those who refuse to accept the rule of the transnational elites. Distributed by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Our 24/7 lives are saturated with round-the-clock fear. Scare-tactic headlines fill our homes and our public spaces. If it’s not the war on terror, it’s the new war on the middle class. Crisis is the new black, as catastrophe after casualty after crash shape the order of the day. Nothing to Lose But Our Fear delivers a counter blow to this rampant culture of fear fuelled by the likes of CNN, Fox and the Daily Mail. Exploring contemporary and historical manifestations of this controlling force, the conversations in this collection go beyond just scrutinizing what constitutes rational versus irrational fear, or identifying ways in which human fears are manipulated by political players. They reveal how fear antagonizes and changes our subjectivity and, crucially, how the political use of fear has been resisted in different times and places, by different people across the globe.
With original contributions from an international team of well-known experts, media activists, and promising young scholars, this comprehensive volume examines community media from theoretical, empirical, historical, and practitioner perspectives. Organized thematically, this collection explores the intersection between community media and issues of democratic theory and the public sphere, cultural politics and social movement theory, neoliberal communication policy and media reform efforts, as well as media activism and international solidarity building. Foregrounding the relationship between symbolic and material relations of power in an increasingly interdependent world, this collection e...
Reconsiders complex questions about how we imagine ourselves and our political communities
Unravelling Research is about the ethics and politics of knowledge production in the social sciences at a time when the academy is pressed to contend with the historical inequities associated with established research practices. Written by an impressive range of scholars whose work is shaped by their commitment to social justice, the chapters grapple with different methodologies, geographical locations and communities and cover a wide range of inquiry, including ethnography in Africa, archival research in South America and research with marginalized, racialized, poor, mad, homeless and Indigenous communities in Canada. Each chapter is written from the perspective of researchers who, due to their race, class, sexual/gender identity, ability and geographical location, labour at the margins of their disciplines. By using their own research projects as sites, contributors probe the ethicality of long-established and cutting-edge methodological frameworks to theorize the indivisible relationship between methodology, ethics and politics, elucidating key challenges and dilemmas confronting marginalized researchers and research subjects alike.
For Land and Culture offers the first comprehensive account of a long forgotten and neglected grassroots movement. In the wake of Iran’s 1979 revolution, Turkmen peasants collectively occupied their ancestral lands, which had been seized through colonial modernization, land registry and land reform under the Pahlavi monarchy. The book chronicles this movement using theoretical and historical engagement with the modern councils and offers a detailed account of the “land question” in Iran’s colonial modernization. The book describes the systematic dispossession of Turkmen communities from some of the most fertile areas in Iran. Vahabzadeh shows how Turkmen land occupation in 1979 led t...
The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. But that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate th...
Based on newly uncovered archival information and a close reading of numerous NFB films, Projecting Canada explores the NFB's involvement with British Empire communication theory and American social science. Using a critical cultural policy studies framework, Druick develops the concept of "government realism" to describe films featuring ordinary people as representative of segments of the population. She demonstrates the close connection between NFB production policies and shifting techniques developed in relation to the evolution of social science from the 1940s to the present and argues that government policy has been the overriding factor in determining the ideology of NFB films. Projecting Canada offers a compelling new perspective on both the development of the documentary form and the role of cultural policy in creating essential spaces for aesthetic production.
The Consulting Trap does a deep dive into how governments have become hooked on private consultancy firms with dire consequences for democratic decision-making, public accountability and accessible public services. Hurl and Werner contend that firms like McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte increasingly take responsibility for core public services, trapping governments in cycles of dependency. Through orchestrating tax avoidance for the wealthy while engineering austerity for the rest, these firms have created the foundations for the deepening privatization of the public services, further entrenching their power. Drawing on case studies from Canada and around the world, Hurl and Werner investigate how big consultancies leverage social networks, institutionalize relationships, mine and commodify data, and establish policy pipelines that facilitate the quick diffusion of ideas across jurisdictions. Drawing from real world examples, The Consulting Trap offers strategies for how these powerful firms can be resisted using people’s audits, public consultations, access to information requests, and social network analyses.
On January 1, 1994 in the far southeast of Mexico, a guerrilla army of indigenous Mayan peasants calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in rebellion against 500 years of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, racism, and neoliberal capitalism. Zapatismo Beyond Borders examines how Zapatismo, the political philosophy of the Zapatistas, crossed the regional and national boundaries of the isolated indigenous communities of Chiapas to influence diverse communities of North American activists. Providing readers with anthropological perspectives that draw on a year of fieldwork with activists, and also enriched by the author's own experience with contemporary social justice ...