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Action Campaign (action + campaign)
Selected AbstractsHumanitarian aid beyond "bare survival": Social movement responses to xenophobic violence in South AfricaAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 4 2009STEVEN ROBINS ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate responses to the humanitarian crisis that emerged following the May 2008 xenophobic violence against South African nonnationals that resulted in 62 deaths and the displacement of well over 30,000 people. I focus specifically on how a South African AIDS activist movement, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its partners, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF,Doctors Without Borders) and the AIDS Law Project (ALP), translated a particular style and strategy of AIDS activism into legal, medical, humanitarian, and political responses to the massive population displacement. The TAC provided relief to displaced people in the form of basic needs, such as food, clothes, and blankets, as well as legal aid, and it engaged in activism that promoted the rights of the refugees. I investigate how the ideas and practices of global agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) were deployed and reinterpreted by TAC activists. I also examine how TAC activists involved in assisting the refugees drew on a global humanitarian assemblage of categories, legal definitions, norms and standards, and procedures and technologies that went beyond the simple management of "bare life." TAC's shift from fighting for antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to fighting for refugees' rights reveals a "politics of life" that spans multiple issues, networks, and constituencies. It is also a politics that, at times, strategically deploys standardized bureaucratic logics and biopolitical techniques of humanitarian aid. [source] Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 5.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 5 2010October 2010 Front and back cover caption, volume 26 issue 5 Front cover RETHINKING SUICIDE BOMBING The body is a key focus for anthropological research and analysis. The cover photographs highlight the way multiple aspects of life, including political life, are mapped onto the body, and the emergence of a collective, as well as individual, identity through these experiences. The front cover shows a young Palestinian boy staring at an Israeli guard's gun, inches from his face, while waiting at the Abu Dis checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Although the scene is calm, the photograph captures an implicit violence (any step out of line can and will be punished) and reveals the daily reality of political and structural violence in the lives of Palestinians. In this image, the child can be seen as an individual who may experience personal trauma as a result of these daily encounters with violence. But he can also be seen as representing a collective Palestinian body which, under the occupation, is humiliated and forced into a childlike position, with daily decisions, including over movement, entirely in the control of Israeli forces. In her article in this issue, Natalia Linos calls on anthropology to offer a critical analysis of suicide bombing and examine the central role of the body in this act. She posits that in a context of political and structural violence that encroaches on both individual and group identity, suicide attacks may be considered an extreme form of reclaiming the violated body through self-directed violence. Through suicide attacks in public spaces, the body may be used to contest physical barriers imposed by an oppressor, resist power imbalances, and reclaim authority over one's body as well as geographical space. Back cover ASSEMBLING BODIES The back cover shows a South African ,body map', on display at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) until 6 November 2010 as part of the exhibition ,Assembling bodies: Art, science and imagination', reviewed in this issue. This self-portrait by Babalwa depicts her life as an activist and epitomizes the ethical and political negotiations that surround definition and treatment of particular bodies in contemporary South Africa. Babalwa was a member of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which successfully campaigned for the widespread availability of antiretroviral treatment therapies. Her self-portrait is one of a series of life-sized body maps made by members of the Bambanani Womens Group in 2003, as part of a project documenting the lives of women with HIV/AIDS. The body maps and associated narratives trace the co-existence of multiple ways of understanding and experiencing bodies and disease in these women's lives. The imagery , referring to family and friends, political life, biomedical science, anatomical details, moral pollution and religious beliefs , suggests many bodies existing within a single corporeal form. In addition to revealing individual subjectivities, the body maps also highlight the shifting dynamics of sociality. Behind each self-portrait is the outline of another shadowy form, a reminder of the help received and the potential for future support. [source] Youth organizing: From youth development to school reformNEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, Issue 117 2008Mark R. Warren Over the past twenty years, youth organizing has grown across the country. Through organizing, young people identify issues of concern and mobilize their peers to build action campaigns to achieve their objectives. Youth organizing has been appreciated for its contributions to youth and community development. The authors use two case studies to trace the more recent emergence of youth organizing as an important force for school reform. The Boston-based Hyde Square Task Force began with a focus on afterschool programming, but its youth leaders now organize to get Boston Public Schools to adopt a curriculum addressing sexual harassment. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Algebra Project began as a peer-to-peer tutoring program but now also organizes to demand greater funding for Baltimore schools. These cases illustrate a broader phenomenon where students reverse the deficit paradigm by acting out of their own self-interest to become agents of institutional change. [source] Imaging vulnerability: the iconography of climate changeAREA, Issue 1 2010Kate Manzo This paper explores the iconography of climate change in contemporary climate action campaigns in the UK. I aim to show how sample images are simultaneously scientific denotations of global warming and cultural connotations of danger and vulnerability. I further demonstrate that while similar images are associated with different agendas and geographical visions, they attach to a shared discourse of vulnerability that has Western (colonial) roots. The paper concludes with an overview of possible ways for climate action campaigns to effectively convey their political messages without recycling colonial visions of the world. [source] | ||||||||||