Great Books for Summer Reading: 2013

Many of you (our valued readers) expressed appreciation for our “Great Books for Summer Reading” feature in 2012, so it is back by popular demand. Our goal is to give readers a healthy selection of interesting books for their summer reading lists.  We invited contributors to choose a social movements/protest-related book of the past couple years—whether scholarly or practical, “fact” or fiction, mainstream or not-so-mainstream—and  write a short review.  Many thanks to our great reviewers:

Eitan Y. Alimi, The Hebrew University
Strangers at the Gates (review)

Mustafa, Gurbuz, University of South Florida
Islam and the Arab Awakening (review)

Chris Hausmann, Northwestern College
Goffman Unbound (review)

Aliza Luft, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A Train in Winter (review)

Jin-Wook Shin, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea
The World Says No to War (review)

Mark Treskon, Center for Working Families, New York
The Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left (review)

Rens Vliegenthart, University of Amsterdam
Patterns of Protest (review)

Enjoy your summer reading!

Editors in Chief,
Grace Yukich, David Ortiz, Rory McVeigh, Dan Myers

Review: A Train in Winter

By Aliza Luft

Caroline Moorhead. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers 2011)

During World War II, Marshal Pétain’s authoritarian Vichy regime guillotined women for abortion. It passed laws forbidding women from entering the civil service, encouraging women younger than 28 to quit their jobs upon marriage, and requiring women over 50 to retire. Pétain considered women responsible for remaking the state beginning with the family: what he called the “essential cell” of social order. Politically active women were considered a threat to the moral regeneration of France (Muel-Dreyfus 2001; Pollard 1998).

In October 1940, the French Vichy government entered into collaboration with Nazi Germany. Laws were promulgated to restrict the rights of Jews and foreigners, communists and other left-wing activists were declared enemies of the state, and French internment camps were transformed into labor and concentration camps for so-called “undesirables.”

Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left

By Mark Trekson

Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left (Duke University Press, 2013)

Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, isn’t exactly beach reading, but to those interested in a novel effort to link a wide range of political theory to practical politics, it is an interesting and (surprisingly—given the theoretical range it covers) engaging read. With apologies to Claude Levi-Strauss, this is the sort of book that is “good to think with,” especially for readers willing to use its engagement with political thought as a jumping off point for further reading or as a way to understand their own activism in  a new way. That said, while this is a book about social movements, those looking for a direct engagement with what I would consider to be the main currents in social movement theory  (both contemporary and historical) will be disappointed.

Amin and Thrift, at least in the United States, are probably best known to those working in what could loosely be considered “critical” urban geography.

Backbenchers’ voices might mean new political opportunities

Political sociologists and social movement scholars have often commented on the overly broad definition of “political opportunities.” Many have called for specifying the nature of political opportunities especially so as to better operationalize and link political opportunities to policy outcomes and social movement mobilization. Indeed, political opportunity structure has referred to the more static nature of a country’s institutional arrangements (for instance, type of political system, electoral representation, etc.), to the more dynamic kind focusing on the presence of sympathetic party elites, party control of government and agenda setting.

Might a Global Events Dataset Contribute to Social Movements Research?

Alex Hanna has a recent post over at Bad Hessian about the potential value of a newly released dataset, GDELT, for the study of social movements.  GDELT stands for Global Data on Events, Location and Tone, and is a news-based events data base covering  the globe for the years 1979-2012.  It is in its beta release,  and will eventually be updated regularly on a near real time basis.  One of many cool things about today’s research environment is that though GDELT has been online for less than two months, one can already find R and python code to assist one’s exploration of it (e.g., see here, here, and here).

Post-Doc Opportunity on Youth Activism

I wanted to bring a post-doc opportunity to people’s attention. Please circulate to anyone you know who might be interested:

Please note that all applications received before May 31^st will receive full consideration, and applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

Youth Activism Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Youth Activism Project, housed in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona, invites applications for a one-year, renewable postdoctoral fellowship on youth and participatory politics to begin in Fall 2013. The Youth Activism Project, directed by Dr. Jennifer Earl, is part of the MacArthur Network on Youth and Participatory Politics. It is focused on youth engagement in protest, particularly online protest and flash activism.

Review: The World Says No to War

By Jin-Wook Shin

Stefaan Walgrave and Dieter Rucht (eds.). The World Says No to War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

On February 15, 2003, when the protest against the war on Iraq took place in London, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, New York, and many other cities of the world, I was writing the last pages of my doctoral dissertation in Berlin and had the opportunity of joining the historic event. I still remember how excited was by the astonishing size, diversity, and vitality of the people who gathered around the Brandenburger Tor at the city center.

It was like a serious political version of a great festival. Parents pushing a stroller, teenagers dancing together, university students holding antiwar drawings by Käthe Kollwitz, and aged couples who seemed to be familiar with all these scenes—so diverse a range of people were saying the same words: “No War!,” “Stop the War!”

Review: Patterns of Protest

By Rens Vliegenthart

Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Patterns of Protest: Trajectories of Participation in Social Movements (Stanford University Press, 2012) Stanford University Press

It is a fascinating question and one that intrigues both social movement scholars and activists: why do people participate in contentious politics and protest? And also, why do they remain active or decide to withdraw? It is exactly those questions that Catherine Corrigall-Brown tries to answer in her book Patterns of Protest. Trajectories of Participation in Social Movements. She rightfully argues that most of us carry a misconception of “the” activist as someone who is fully and life-long devoted to one single cause and largely acts within one organization. This type of person, however, is very rare. People get involved in a social movement organization, stay active for a while, but are likely—for one reason or the other—to stop after a certain time completely, or move on to a different organization and/or cause.