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Grassroots Movement (grassroots + movement)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954,1963: The Government, the Grassroots Movement, and the Politics of Risk

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2008
Toshihiro Higuchi
This paper challenges the centrality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our understanding of Japan's antinuclear activism. Focusing on the social distribution and perception of the fallout d*anger, I reexamine the symbiotic dynamics of governmental diplomacy and the grassroots movement against nuclear tests from 1954 to 1963. I argue that radioactive pollution during the Bikini incident triggered a consumerist and materialist turn in the peace movement with housewives at the center. Initially resisting the citizens' perception of risk, the conservative administration by 1957 came to embrace it and launched diplomacy against nuclear tests to steal people's support away from the grassroots movement. At this crucial moment, the grassroots movement's leadership switched its focus from fallout to the "war policy" in the West, which brought about a paradigm shift from the consumerist and materialist platform toward militant workerism for socialist peace. Now disparaging fallout as merely a "physical phenomenon," the campaign leaders left the environmental angle exposed in 1961 when the Soviet Union unilaterally broke a test moratorium in effect since 1958. While the government's diplomacy, shrewdly stressing the fallout danger, applied a blow to the campaign, the group was split and paralyzed over a protest of Soviet fallout until it dissolved in 1963. The Japanese experience ultimately proved to be an abortive attempt to grasp the environmental legacy of the Bikini incident. [source]

Literacy, Knowledge Production, and Grassroots Civil Society: Constructing Critical Responses to Neoliberal Dominance

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2009
Erika MeinArticle first published online: 14 DEC 200
Within the context of neoliberal globalization, portrayals of "literacy" and "knowledge" are increasingly emphasized for their instrumental value for individuals and markets. At the same time, locally situated movements have emerged to challenge, resist, and transform these representations. This article examines a grassroots movement in Mexico, the Feria Pedagógica (Pedagogical Fair), as one such site of contestation. Grounded in nonmainstream notions of "civil society," this movement represents an alternative educational space where literacy practices are tied to the construction of counterhegemonic identities and epistemologies.[literacy, civil society, social movements, popular education, Mexico] [source]

Washing away poverty: Water, democracy and gendered poverty eradication in South Africa

NATURAL RESOURCES FORUM, Issue 3 2004
Barbara Schreiner
Abstract This article discusses ways in which the South African Government and grassroots organizations envisage and implement democracy achieved since 1994 in the field of water resources management. The focus is on the democratic, political and economic freedom and equality in resource rights for poor black women, who are central to poverty eradication. While the new water policy and law provide an enabling framework for achieving these goals, implementation on the ground encounters both new opportunities and constraints. This is illustrated by several cases of establishing South Africa's new water management institutions: catchment management agencies and water user associations. The important nexus between state-led democratization of water resources management and bottom-up grassroots movements is also discussed. The article concludes that the Government's affirmative and targeted intervention is indispensable for redressing gender inequalities and eradicating poverty. [source]

Rites to Reform: The Cultural Production of the Reformer in Urban Schools

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2010
K. Wayne Yang
As neoliberal reformers are appointed to manage the "crisis" of U.S. public schools, their power has become a pressing reality for grassroots movements in education. I examine how the Small Schools movement in Oakland, California,just as the school district fell under state administrative control,employed rites of passage to socialize a grassroots identity: the reform officer. These rites represent a form of grassroots cultural power that disrupts the conditions of neoliberal domination.,[neoliberalism, school reform, counterhegemony, community organizing, cultural production] [source]