This is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s.
Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends.
As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neo-conservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts on feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilise and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action.
How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities?
Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development.
Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement.
Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.
In this engaging and original book, John Clarke is in conversation with 12 leading scholars about the dynamics of thinking critically in the social sciences. The conversations range across many fields and explore the problems and possibilities of doing critical intellectual work in ways that are responsive to changing conditions.
By emphasising the many voices in play, in conversation with as well as against others, Clarke challenges the individualising myth of the heroic intellectual. He underlines the value of thinking critically, collaboratively and dialogically.
The book also provides access to a sound archive of the original conversations.
their experiences point to the central role of the concept in helping the activists to make sense of their pasts and orient collectively towards the future, despite their traumatizing experiences. During my fieldwork, I was intrigued by the therapeutic role played by feminist gatherings and action around the theme of gendered violence and related trauma. These were some of the most collective moments of feminism which, I suggest, like the theatre gathering described at the beginning of this chapter, often turned to collective therapy and healing. Indeed, feminist
protestors succeeded. In all of these examples, there is an emerging sense of explicit public accountability. ‘Don’t sleep on silk’, one mural asks of the collective us – as if to advise viewers that while the path ahead is a long and arduous one, it is worth taking. ‘Collective therapy of the civil war, for the first time since the civil war’, another reminds, contextualising the current moment in its wider historical frame. And so, too, these public artworks identify and make explicit the figureheads of the collective other. This is no longer the sectarian other that
Brexit came not through any of those, but through an ‘Oh dear God’ moment, which is, you know, the collective therapy of trying to think about it, talk about it, and write about it. And from time to time I think, ‘I might know enough, I might not know enough to write about it.’ And then I write something, and I read other people’s and I think, ‘I am not sure that you know enough, either.’ Janet: Is that a kind of collaboration, when you come across people that make you think in a different way? [01:09:05] John: It is, and I think, I mean there is a double
