Feminist Challenges to the Reframing of Equality and Social Justice
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Archiv für November 2016
Philip IV of Spain and the Portuguese Inquisition (1621–1641)
The historiography of the Iberian Inquisitions has focused on analysing relations between the Holy Office and the secular authorities in the society in which it operated. The Inquisition was not an island. It influenced and was influenced by society. …
Latin American ‘free-trade unionism’ and the cold War: an analysis based on educational policies
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Understanding the geographical development of social movements: a web-link analysis of Slow Food
Slow Food (SF) is a global, grassroots movement aimed at enhancing and sustaining local food cultures and traditions worldwide. Since its establishment in the 1980s, Slow Food groups have emerged across the world and embedded in a wide range of different contexts. In this article, we explain how the movement, as a diverse whole, is being shaped by complex dynamics existing between grassroots flexibilities and emerging drives for movement coherence and harmonization. Unlike conventional studies on social movements, our approach helps one to understand transnational social movements as being simultaneously coherent and diverse bodies of collective action. Drawing on work in the fields of relational geography, assemblage theory and webometric research, we develop an analytical strategy that navigates and maps the entire Slow Food movement by exploring its ‘double articulation’ between the material-connective and ideational-expressive. Focusing on representations of this connectivity and articulation on the internet, we combine methodologies of computation research (webometrics) with more qualitative forms of (web) discourse analysis to achieve this. Our results point to the significance of particular networks and nodal points that support such double movements, each presenting core logistical channels of the movement’s operations as well as points of relay of new ideas and practices. A network-based analysis of ‘double articulation’ thus shows how the co-evolution of ideas and material practices cascades into major trends without having to rely on a ‘grand‘, singular explanation of a movement’s development.
Transnational social movements and changing organizational fields in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil-society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the ‘neoliberalization of civil society’ and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles.