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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

Ching Kwan Lee, (2007), x + 325 (University of California Press, Berkeley, $55.00, paperback $21.95). This book is a solid study of laboUr politics in contemporary China. Largely based on years of ...

Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt

Low-wage workers in the United States face obstacles including racial and ethnic discrimination, a pervasive lack of wage enforcement, misclassification of their employment, and for some, their status as undocumented immigrants. In the past, political parties, unions, and fraternal and mutual-aid societies served as important vehicles for workers who hoped to achieve political and economic integration. As these traditional civic institutions have weakened, low-wage workers must seek new structures for mutual support. Worker centers are among the institutions to which workers turn as they strive to build vibrant communities and attain economic and political visibility. Community-based worker centers help low-wage workers gain access to social services; advocate for their own civil and human rights; and organize to improve wages, working conditions, neighborhoods, and public schools.In this pathbreaking book, Janice Fine identifies 137 worker centers in more than eighty cities, suburbs, and rural areas in thirty-one states. These centers, which attract workers in industries that are difficult to organize, have emerged as especially useful components of any program intended to assist immigrants and low-wage workers of color. Worker centers serve not only as organizing laboratories but also as places where immigrants and other low-wage workers can participate in civil society, tell their stories to the larger community, resist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and work to improve their political and economic standing.

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Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream

The dynamics, politics, and richness of knowledge production within social movements and activist contexts are often overlooked in scholarly literature, and sometimes even in the movements themselves. Given the academic emphasis on whether an action, campaign, or movement can be judged a “success,” the intellectual work that takes place in movements frequently goes unseen, as do the politics, processes, sites, and locations of knowledge production and learning in activist settings. Even social movement scholarship that draws upon or is embedded in movement actor perspectives has an expressed interest in “taking the measure of the new movements” (see Tom Mertes, 2004, p. xi, a collection of interviews with activists, originally published in New Left Review). The contributors to this collection, however, suggest that many powerful critiques and understandings of dominant ideologies and power structures, visions of social change, and the politics of domination and resistance in general emerge from these spaces and subsequently emphasize the significance of the knowledge-production dimensions of movement activism. Learning from the Ground Up also challenges ways in which grassroots and movement voices are often overwritten or otherwise marginalized in the context of purportedly “alternative” civil society networks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The interdisciplinary approaches adopted by the authors in this volume are as rich as the varied movements, processes, and dynamics of knowledge production that these chapters explore and elucidate.

Learning from the Ground Up : Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production

The concept of a movement landscape is used to analyse continuities and changes in popular mobilization since the end of formal apartheid. Focusing on four different episodes of protest since 1997,...

Mapping movement landscapes in South Africa

Sociology as a combat sport

In this article, the author argues that socially engaged sociology cannot be understood as a practice isolated in the quadrant of ‘public sociology’ as suggested by Michael Burawoy’s organization of sociology into four distinct quadrants but that it is closely associated with critical policy sociology as well as critical professional sociology. The author uses a case study of hospital transformation in post-apartheid South Africa to demonstrate the way sociological activism cycles through public, policy and professional sociological fields and to explore the nature of each of these fields as contested fields of power characterized by dominant and subordinate sociologies. The author resurrects Eddie Webster’s concept of critical engagement and expands its scope to suggest that the stance of the progressive – or radical – sociologist, who is engaged and committed to subaltern publics but retains a critical independence, is reproduced in the field of professional sociology in the form of what Burawoy calls c...

Critical engagement in fields of power: Cycles of sociological activism in post-apartheid South Africa

https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/article/download/1093/1149

Karl von Holdt

Papers

Mapping movement landscapes in South Africa

Sociology as a combat sport

Critical engagement in fields of power: Cycles of sociological activism in post-apartheid South Africa

Review of Jennifer Jihye Chun's 'Organising at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States'

Reading Bourdieu in South Africa