Browsing by Subject "social movement"

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    Redefining social movement: Utopianism and popular education in Buenos Aires
    (2014-06) Krausch, Meghan
    This dissertation is a case study of a bachillerato popular (people's high school) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded in the wake of Argentina's 2001 crisis, the school is a secondary school completion project for adults operating under the umbrella of the "National Assembly," a large social movement that is structured non-hierarchically and uses consensus-based decision-making. Based on a year of feminist ethnographic fieldwork and supplemental in-depth interviews, the study analyzes daily life at the school to develop a better understanding of social movements more broadly. This dissertation contributes to the existing sociological literature on social movements in three important ways. First, I develop the concept of utopian social movements, a lens for analysis of movements that incorporates meaning-making and claims-making into a single framework (in strong contrast to the popular theoretical paradigm of contentious politics). The school struggles to improve the material conditions of participant activists, a majority of whom are marginalized across multiple axes of difference (i.e., race/nationality, class, and gender). At the same time it seeks to establish the conditions for what is here termed dialogic freedom, the idea of liberation as a condition of being that is dialogic, reflexive, dialectic, and processual. Dialogic freedom is practiced through critical pedagogy as well as a more broadly intellectual vision of politics, and the way it is intertwined at the people's high school with a daily and long-term struggle to achieve better housing, food, and living conditions is a hallmark of utopian social movements. Second, I show how the school accomplishes its goals by producing a collective subject, which is (re)produced through a combination of structural and affective elements in practice at the people's high school: non-hierarchy, consensus, mística, and everyday collective effervescence. The case of the people's high school highlights the centrality of affective practices to liberatory politics, including those movements which take material deprivation as their starting point. Finally, this research makes an important empirical contribution to existing knowledge about social movements by describing in rich ethnographic detail how the school's ambitious utopian project is carried out by the subaltern and under what conditions.
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    To Think Like An Agroecologist: The Greenhorns And New Agrarian Rhetoric
    (2023-08) Geier Olive, Grace
    The concept of agrarianism has a deep history in the United States. Beginning withThomas Jefferson’s vision of an ideal society comprised of yeoman farmer citizens, agrarianism’s implications and uses have evolved over time. Initially an ideology of U.S. American settler colonialism, agrarianism was taken up in later decades by farmers themselves in social movements. In recent decades, agrarian ideology has taken another turn towards agricultural sustainability in what scholars and activists call “new” agrarianism. New agrarianism is concerned with the wellbeing of the entire living system and has shifted towards an ideology that anyone can apply to their lives. Capturing the character and significance of the discursive transformation of agrarianism is an open scholarly project that this dissertation aims to join. I examine how one social movement organization, the Greenhorns, enters into this discourse and uses agrarianism in their efforts to support the movement for sustainable agriculture and changes the nature of agrarian discourse. Through a rhetorical analysis of a variety of their materials, I analyze how agrarianism figures in the Greenhorns’ recruitment, education, and maintenance. My assessment of these materials reveals that agrarian ideology functions as a central discourse as they recruit people and support a broader movement for sustainable agriculture, educate potential recruits to cultivate an activist agrarian farmer, and maintain the social movement they support by harnessing communication as a resource and stewarding an agrarian rhetorical ecology. Despite drawbacks such as the complexities of relying on an ideology with a brutal history and the difficulty of addressing multiple audiences, the Greenhorns’ use of agrarianism demonstrates the utility of the concept in movements that aim to ameliorate environmental degradation. In addition to furthering academic understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of new agrarianism, this dissertation advances understandings of various threads of scholarship in environmental communication and social movement rhetoric.