Browsing by Subject "Social movements"
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Item Deviants and dissidents: children's sexuality and the limits of liberation.(2010-08) Patters, N’Jai-An ElizabethMy dissertation takes the child as its focus to understand both liberation politics and social conservative movements in the postwar United States. I reveal that, even as leftist social movements viewed children as possessing "sexuality" and argued for the liberation of children's sexual expression, they simultaneously invoked the child as a vulnerable figure who must be protected from sexual abuse and violence in a dangerous postwar culture. Ultimately, the protectionist rhetoric about children's sexuality proved more powerful and influential than the libratory rhetoric, in large part because it shared features with the burgeoning rhetoric of the religious right, who found political power in a broad call to "save the children." My analysis of these competing rhetorical frameworks reveals the ways in which the child came to structure late-20th-century political discourse by marking the limits of liberation. Using children's sexuality as a point of entry into postwar political activism, my dissertation sheds light on the evolution of political identities. Ultimately, my work highlights the shrinking of progressive political possibilities and the emergence of a consolidated conservative political discourse. This dissertation argues that 1970s social movement groups' attention to and use of the figure of the child, particularly children's sexuality, was central to their efforts to advance libratory frameworks. I trace the ways that three Boston groups--the Boston Women's Health Collective, the Elizabeth Stone House, and the North American Man/Boy Love Association--organized around issues of children's sexuality. Each adopted seemingly altruistic child-focused agendas that were used to benefit the groups' adult members. In advancing these agendas, group members participated in the creation of a symbolic child-victim whose invocation would become a means of foreclosing political debate and establishing a cultural consensus of protection in the 1980s. In the end, the figure of the child that was so central to libratory movements of the 1970s was the very thing that limited their vocabularies and contained their agendas by the 1980s. Rather than focusing on a single movement, this project demonstrates that the child repeatedly emerged as a political tool in leftist activism and argues that this figure shaped the boundaries of liberation and the content of radicalism.Item The effects of facilitation management on interorganizational coordination and trust in an Anti-Iraq War political advocacy nonprofit network in the Twin Cities.(2010-04) Hansen, Toran JayThis study is a communications network evaluation of the organizations in the Twin Cities opposing the current Iraq War. The theoretical framework, testable hypotheses, and research questions drew from social network, social movement, empowerment, and group facilitation scholarship. Multiple linear regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses that relationships existed between the independent variable `facilitation management' (including the facilitation functions of: logistical arrangements for communications, social support, participatory discussion, conflict resolution, and participatory decision-making) and the dependent variables trust and coordination. These relationships were confirmed, though facilitation management had a larger effect on coordination. The study also investigated how concentrated responsibility was for the various facilitation functions among the network members. Facilitation functions that were found to be more concentrated (logistical arrangements (including: organizing and information dissemination), participatory discussion, and participatory decision-making) were considered facilitated in the network. Data were collected for this study in three phases. A background questionnaire collected information about the organizations that were represented in this study, as well as the study participants' perceptions of whether they felt that their network was expanding or contracting over the year prior to the study. A primary questionnaire was then utilized to collect data concerning the study participants' demographic information, their perceptions of their facilitation functions, trust, and coordination, their perceptions of their accomplishments and challenges, their perceptions of the worthwhileness and effectiveness of their activities, and their perceptions of the network's context over the previous three-month period. Finally, the study participants were invited to a focus group meeting to discuss their impressions of the research process and the study's findings, after they were given a report detailing the findings and insights that emerged from the literature review. The report included a discussion of findings coming from formative evaluation questions designed to determine specific ways that the communications network could be enhanced. Thus, this study was also a form of action research that accorded with the principles of empowerment theory.Item Indigenous global politics.(2009-11) Lightfoot, Sheryl RaeThe Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed the United Nations General Assembly on September 13, 2007. This document articulates the minimum international standard on indigenous peoples' rights that nation states are obligated to recognize and protect. It took more than thirty years of intense effort by the indigenous rights movement to achieve passage of the Declaration. This dissertation explores how indigenous politics at the global level compels a new direction of thought in International Relations. I argue that indigenous global politics is a perspective of International Relations that complicates the structure of international politics in new and important ways, challenging both Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and the (neo-)liberal foundations of states and the international system. A case study of the international indigenous peoples' movement and the development of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates how attempts to secure indigenous rights at the international level are helping to forge new articulations of the concepts of sovereignty, the state, and territoriality. I have also detected a peculiar pattern of state response to these changes, a pattern that was previously undetected, unexamined and thus also unnamed in International Relations. I have termed this puzzling pattern "over-compliance," by which I mean that a state's indigenous rights policy behavior goes above and beyond its international commitments. My qualitative case studies of Canadian and New Zealand indigenous rights "over-compliance," based on original field research, analyze both the potential and the limits of the challenges posed by indigenous global politics. My research identifies several mechanisms that explain both legal "over-compliance" with treaty standards and de facto policy under-compliance, including the domestic and international strength of transnational indigenous movements and coalitions, and changes within a state's domestic political discourse regarding indigenous reconciliation.Item Interview with Clarke A. Chambers(University of Minnesota, 1996-03-15) Chambers, Clarke A.; Strauss, KarenKaren Strauss interviews Professor Emeritus Clarke A. Chambers.