Alex was awarded his PhD in Philosophy by the University of Essex in 2015. Before this, Alex studied Philosophy & Ancient History at the University of Wales, Swansea and Philosophy at the University of Bristol. Alex has over five years of teaching experience in Ethics, History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. He has worked at the Institute of Continuing Education since 2015 as Academic Director for Philosophy and as a Panel Tutor.
What can moral theory do in a situation where the comprehensive consensus among all human beings that would alone justify universally valid principles of rational discourse is necessarily a counterfactual assumption? Doesn't this lead to scepticism? I don't think so. There are possibilities of rational discourse under these circumstances of insecurity. The fact that we cannot attain an ultimate foundation does not mean that everything is equally plausible. Some possibilities are arguably more plausible than others. The reference point for such considerations is Habermas' paradigm of the 'impartial standpoint', which points to the imaginary 'assent of a universal audience'.
Social justice as a concept has been part of our social imagination and has been one of the core fundamental ideas in our political discourse that has transformed Indian society. Both Gandhi and Ambedkar, with different perspectives, played a crucial role in shaping the public discourse on social justice in anti-colonial thought. But did their assumptions uniquely anchor the tensions that existed within a discourse of justice in the Indian context? Their interest in constructing India's post-colonial legal and political structures had a profound effect on the proliferation of new genres and alternative discourses of framing social and political ideals. Their books, articles and published communications have been the object of various interpretations, which usually seek to understand and respond to social, political, cultural and academic conjunctures related to the deepening of the crisis of the political system. Drawing on these two perspectives, I wish to make explicit that this discussion on justice is different from the debates in Western political theory that are mostly understood as considerations for 'fairness' (Miller 2013: 209). Their reflections on political institutions, concepts used to interpret and organise political life, the relation between aims of ethics and the nature of politics are still relevant as they continue to inform our current context.
This chapter attempts to critically look at certain theories that ultimately rationalise inevitability of exploitative relations of domination on the one hand and those, which give primacy to discourse, divested of social determinants, for social movements on the other. The chapter looks at subaltern subjectivity with praxis approach to understand the resisting agency of the oppressed with reference to the underlying causes of emancipatory collective practices. Situating within the contending paradigms of history, state, ideology, and connections between class, ideology, politics and economy, the chapter examines the theoretical underpinnings particularly of Michel Foucault and James Scott on power, conditions of subjugation and resistance to these. In the course of discussion and explication of certain parallel practices, the chapter prominently brings into discussion Marx, Habermas, Althusser, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Moore, Poulantzas, Laclau and Mouffe, as well as other theorists.
According to Ambedkar, one can think of the Mahad Satyagraha as equal to the French Revolution. One can think of them as equal analogically; at the same time, one must think of them as equal and incomparable. The analogical schema first: by virtue of their respective institutions of the 'norm of equality', Mahad and the French Revolution become analogous, but the comparison gains its real efficacy from the analogy of truth-effects that attaches to their respective discursive ensembles. If Ambedkar is not making the trivial point of similar forms of institution but that the two conjunctures are traversed by comparable truth-effects despite vast differences of the institution of historical discourses, then the further significance of this analogical schema lies in its common function in both cases that it consolidates the history beyond and against the old regime in the name of a new regime of truth-effect(s).
This chapter is written in the form of the differences in and agreements on ideas related to the Vedanta between Narayana Guru and his disciple Nataraja Guru. The chapter turns on the difference in their respective attitude towards the Bhagavad Gita as a philosophical exegesis for Monism or Advaita. Narayana Guru's reservations toward the Gita stem from the fact that it meets with a violent conclusion (the battle of Mahabharata), which he found it difficult to endorse as a means for discursive knowledge is met with silence in the interpretations of his disciple. Notwithstanding the masterly effort by Sundar Sarukkai (see Chapter 5) to philosophise his teacher's spiritual gleanings, Nataraja Guru fails to register significance of the break with theistic Monism that Narayana Guru achieved in his negative response to the Gita as a philosophical text. In the larger picture, the chapter tries to argue that this break also signifies his break with the Brahminical social order or the caste system and the initial steps taken towards the composition of a multitude, which would take its place in a future nation.
I IN RECENT DECADES WORLD CAPITALISM HAS BEEN UNDERGOING A process of globalization, or profound restructuring and expansion. What type of human capital does the emerging global capitalist system require in order for it to function (which is to say, in order for capital accumulation to overcome the technical and political impediments to its continuous expansion)? For one, it needs a cadre of organic intellectuals (1) who are to do the overall thinking and strategizing for the system, as well as a small army of technocrats and administrators who are to resolve problems of system maintenance and development. At the same time, this system needs a very large army, indeed, of people who will supply nothing but their labor, and who are not disposed or equipped to think critically and reflexively about their existence or that of a system sustained on great inequalities and ever more repressive and ubiquitous social control. Finally, it needs a mass of humanity as surplus labor--let us say a few billion people or so--who can serve as a reserve supply of manual and other forms of low-skilled and flexible labor in agriculture, industry, and services; who can be carefully controlled at all times; and who can be discarded when no longer needed. What kind of an educational system would be able to deliver such a mass of humanity endowed with, or lacking in, the sets of skills, knowledge, and mental faculties needed to meet these requirements? Certainly, it would need a core of elite centers of education where the organic intellectuals who administer the system and engage in its ongoing design would study and train. Below it would be a tier of educational institutions producing every sort of vocational and technocratic expert, what Robert Reich (1992) once referred to as symbolic analysts and others have called knowledge workers--that is, people trained in the use and manipulation of symbols, whether as engineers, computer programmers, scientists, or financial analysts. In exchange for their services and their obedience, they would be rewarded with comfortable lifestyles. Then there would be the mass of humanity increasingly precariatized and thrown into the ranks of surplus labor, who only need basic numeracy and literacy skills in order to supply labor for the system, and whose potential for critical thinking could nevertheless pose a serious threat to the capitalist order. This tier in the educational system would be quite restricted in its pedagogical content (if not in its provision), serving the dual function of supplying the numeracy, literacy, and technical knowledge necessary to produce servile workers while suppressing the development of critical thinking that could mount a challenge to global capitalism and its punitive social control. In fact, this is just the kind of educational system that the transnational elite has promoted worldwide in recent years. (2) The Trifurcation of Humanity: The 1 Percent, the 20 Percent, and the 80 Percent On the eve of the 2015 annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, an event attended exclusively by the cream of the transnational business, political, and cultural elite (it cost about $40,000 to attend, and at that, one must be invited), the development NGO Oxfam released a report on global inequality, aptly titled Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More (Oxfam 2015b). The report observed that the wealthiest 1 percent of humanity owned 48 percent of the world's wealth in 2014, up from 44 percent in 2009, and that under current trends, this 1 percent would own more than 50 percent of the global wealth by 2016. The obscenity of such concentrations of wealth becomes truly apparent when seen in the context of expanding inequality. The report identified the world's richest 80 billionaires among this 1 percent, whose wealth has increased from $1.3 trillion in 2010 to $1.9 trillion in 2014, an increment of $600 billion in just four years, or by 50 percent in nominal terms (ibid. …
Public Administration ReviewVolume 67, Issue 2 p. 355-357 Faith and Government Naomi Caiden, Corresponding Author Naomi Caiden California State University, Los AngelesNaomi Caiden is a professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles, where she teaches public budgeting and public administration. She is the coauthor of Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries (with Aaron Wildavsky, Transaction Books, 1980) and a past editor of Public Budgeting and Finance.E-mail: [email protected].Search for more papers by this author Naomi Caiden, Corresponding Author Naomi Caiden California State University, Los AngelesNaomi Caiden is a professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles, where she teaches public budgeting and public administration. She is the coauthor of Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries (with Aaron Wildavsky, Transaction Books, 1980) and a past editor of Public Budgeting and Finance.E-mail: [email protected].Search for more papers by this author First published: 06 April 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2007.00719_3.xCitations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Reference Raadschelders, Jos C.N. 2002. An Administrative-History Perspective on Church-State Relations: On the Varied Impacts of Judeo-Christian Heritage and Organized Religion. In State and Church in Western Europe in an Administrative-History Perspective, edited by Jos C. N. Raadschelders. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Citing Literature Volume67, Issue2March|April 2007Pages 355-357 ReferencesRelatedInformation
LET US START BY LOCATING THETWO PARTICIPANTS IN THIS EXCHANGE: AS A MEMBER OF the Walls to Bridges Collective, a group of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people that meets regularly at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario (with a second circle in Toronto), Simone Davis helps to coordinate the Walls to Bridges program. The Collective offers a reciprocal learning model and we seek to help usher into this world profound transformations of both educational and justice paradigms. Our work includes training and supporting faculty from around Canada who want to bring incarcerated and non-incarcerated students together to learn in community. While the voice in this essay is Simone Davis's (and I take full responsibility for the views I present), this piece emerges out of and introduces an ongoing conversation between Davis and Bruce Michaels, a peer-to-peer educator (his chosen term) who has helped to found, facilitate, and grow a multifaceted, robust, entirely prisoner-run college program at the facility in a Midwestern state where he is incarcerated. (1) The central intention behind this essay is to argue that outside allies and faculty who work in higher-education prison programs affiliated with a university need to learn from and work with educators inside, who are acquiring our education under severe circumstances, and sharing what we're learning, as Michaels puts it. In the face of the mid-1990s squelching of prison postsecondary programs on both sides of the US-Canada border, long-swollen incarceration rates (now growing in Canada), and today's slashed programming budgets, scores of North American outside groups affiliated with universities are developing higher-education prison programs. (2) These typically navigate a complex ethical terrain on several fronts at once. The central challenges for such programs circulate around the danger of bolstering up a penal system that needs more radical transformation than reform. In Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime, Dylan Rodriguez (2006, 75-108) draws a useful and very sharp distinction between the analyses and praxis of radical prison intellectuals and those of formally accepted higher-education prison programs. For Rodriguez, higher-education programs in prison, even when course content or (faculty/student) intent are critical and anti-oppressive, serve ultimately to uphold the prison industrial complex, because they support its claims to a rehabilitative mission. Thereby, they make the prison system more palatable and thus more viable, when in fact it needs to be dismantled and our justice practices need to be entirely reconceived. As Brian D. Maclean argued in a 1992 piece in the Journal of Prisoners on Prison, higher-education facilitators from universities on the outside can wind up increasing the scale and scope of surveillance and scrutiny of imprisoned people. So too, they can find themselves inadvertently eliciting from students the compulsory narratives of redemption and gratitude that they know to be a requisite for people moving through the criminal justice system, seeking appeals, approaching parole, etc. In so doing, whether accidentally or intentionally, programs of higher education in prison can also promote the myth of education as social mobility for the individual striver, if s/he can just grab the proper bootstraps. Based on a construct of individual fault and achievement that obscures structural, political, legal, economic, racialized, and gendered inequities, this story about the way education works shores up and extends the analogous tales we tell about punishment. Meanwhile, those who choose to go inside argue that the risk of abetting a violent system is worth navigating because of the urgent need for educational justice and for opened lines of communication for and with people locked inside. I see a bottleneck or stasis that has emerged in the debate about higher education in prison--a frozen place in the conversation about whether these programs help to shore up a flawed system or to instigate meaningful social transformation. …
In March 2009, Ian Brodie, former chief of staff for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, spoke at a McGill University conference on role of in government policymaking. His appraisal was frank and candid. He stated that government, specifically Conservative government that was in power until defeated by Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party in October 2015 election, really had to engage properly in question of what actually shows about various approaches to (Brodie 2009). Indeed, fact that various academics were speaking out against Conservative government's tough on policy reforms was politically advantageous for government: During my time as a practitioner of policy in Mr. Harper's government I was piqued, from time to time, to see our government attacked by students of policy for embarking on policies that some of them thought lacked a firm basis in evidence. Every lime, for example, we proposed amendments to Criminal Code, sociologists, criminologists, defense lawyers and liberals ... attacked us for proposing measures that evidence, apparently, showed did not work. It was a good thing for us politically that sociologists, criminologists, and defense lawyers were and are all held in lower repute than conservative politicians for voting public. Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types. So we never really had to engage properly in question of what actually shows about various approaches to crime. And Canadians who noticed rising rates of youth and violent crime came to common sense conclusion that whatever was being done to tackle it was not working. (ibid.) This antipathy toward criminological knowledge has concrete effects. Since taking power in 2006,Canada's Conservative-led federal government has introduced more than 80 criminal justice, sentencing, and corrections reform bills. (1) In 2011, during first parliamentary session after successfully forming a majority government. Conservative majority passed 70 percent of criminal justice-oriented bills, including Bill C-10, an omnibus crime bill that combined amendments from nine separate bills that had failed to pass in previous sessions of Parliament. Legislative reform has continued in recent years. In January 2015 (an election year), government introduced new sweeping anti-terrorist legislation and signaled arrival of Criminal Code amendments to allow for life sentences without chance of parole (Anti-Terrorism Act 2015; see Fine 2015). As described in a letter from office of Justice Minister Peter Mackay to Ottawa Citizen, federal government's legislative agenda aims to transform justice system so that it is no longer centered on welfare of criminals and instead to refocus it on the protection of society and redress of victims-even if these measures run contrary to research and about expected outcomes of this policy (Seymour 2015). The irony of federal political antipathy toward criminological is that it occurred within a policy context saturated by calls for evidence-based practices. Although evidence-informed policy reform is now tightly linked to research funding, (2) criminologists are more preoccupied than ever about gap between criminological research findings and political policy prescriptions. Researchers have long grappled with related issues (Brodeur 1999; Rock 2014). For example, criminologists have tried to address troublesome nature of criminological knowledge, role ought to play in discourse, and impact of perceptions and political partisanship on various forms and levels of policy. More recently, various authors have advocated public criminology as one particular response to apparent disconnect between and policy. Advocates of a typically acknowledge that politics of crime policy are intrinsically controversial and deeply contested, that criminological evidence is always partial and conditional, and that policy prescriptions are often disputed and contingent on epistemological positions (Currie 2007; Garland and Sparks 2000; Tonry and Green 2003; Turner 2013; Uggen and Inderbitzin 2010). …
SINCE THE 1970s, FEMINIST RESEARCHERS IN CRIMINOLOGY AND OTHER DISCIPLINES have engaged with ideas about voice, representation, inclusion, and authorized knowers in order challenge male-biased positivism in the social sciences and develop alternative of knowing (Belenky et al. 1986; Harding 1990; Stanley and Wise 1983). Critiques from women of color, Aboriginal, and lesbian feminists challenged the white biases and colonial assumptions embedded in this early work and the false assumption that there is a universal woman's experience, leading further feminist work on positionality, power, and (Kilty 2014). Contemporary feminist and other critical scholarship examines the complexities of multiple axes of power embedded within a variety of research methods (Jackson and Mazzei 2009) and the articulation of participatory methodologies in which researcher reflexivity is central (Kilty, Felices-Luna. and Fabian 2014). Our work joins these conversations by exploring how move beyond giving voice marginalized populations--a qualitative convention that maintains the authority of the scholar as privileged--toward a collaborative approach knowledge production. This article, a collaboration between an academic/practitioner (Shoshana) and a formerly incarcerated woman (Tiina),aims disrupt conventional ways of conducting and writing about research. Our focus is on explicating the process we engaged in while researching student experiences of university classes taught in a prison setting comprised of both incarcerated and non-incarcerated students, and how our work together tries unsettle the subjectivities of the academic knower and the criminalized woman. Results from the study have been reported elsewhere (Pollack 2014), but our focus in this paper is methodological: specifically, on the process of analyzing interview data and reflecting upon the meaning of our collaborative work. We do not approach this article from a standpoint epistemological perspective that claims that one of us has a more accurate, legitimate, or objective view; rather we put our perspectives in conversation with one another in order think through the gendered discursive complexities of experiencing incarceration. Our article is multivocal as we put in conversation our own voices, scholarship, lived experience, and interview data. At times we write in first person, at other times in conventional discourse, engaged in a conversation between and within texts and voices. We are not seeking a of innocence in research about prisons and prisoners, but rather we place our attention on our process of drawing upon our respective knowledge emerging from our lived experiences, training, and shared feminist antiracist politics. Similar Piche et al.'s project to push the boundaries of what it means 'give voice' in work and in criminological literature specifically (2014, 450), our work explores collaborative research and scholarship between an researcher/educator and a researcher/ student/former prisoner. Penal Spectatorship and Hearing Voices In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown (2009, 21) uses the notion of refer the individual and institutional means of at other people's pain from a distance and perpetuating the ideologies and practices of punishment in the process. Penal spectatorship, according Brown, takes many forms: theory, scientific investigation, prison tourism, media, and film, all of which have something do with gazing at other people's pain. She suggests that spectatorship is not only about looking at, but also involves authoring and authorizing penal practices. A defining feature of the spectator gaze is an experiential distance from the pain and suffering of imprisonment. Although not the focus of her book, we extend this concept also explore the way that prison processes themselves foster (actually require) prisoners become penal spectators of their own lives. …
IN 2007, ON ONE OF MANY TRIPS TO THE MIXTECA REGION OF OAXACA, I SET OUT FROM Santiago Juxtlahuaca to visit the community credit unions and gastronomy projects of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB ; Indigenous Front of B !national Organizations) with then regional director Centolia Maldonado, who served as a coresearcher and guide on the project. We visited Isabel Reyes, a mother who talked to me while making tortillas to sell at the market. As she moved quickly between the grill and the masa press on a small wooden table, with her baby in a rebozo on her back, I asked if I was bothering her. She laughed and said no, that talking while working was ideal because it made the work go faster. She invited me to pull up the small child's chair in her outdoor kitchen, and there I sat, with the recorder balanced on a brick, as she told me of how she was doing better now that she had organized with other women to save money and invest in her small tortilla business. Her words were punctuated with the quick rhythm of masa pounding between fast hands, and intermixed with the loud song of a turkey who stalked around the yard. After piling back into the taxi with the yellow and green FIOB logo on the door, we were driven by one of the companeros from the FIOB taxi collective to our next stop in Santa Maria to visit Dona Matilde (see Photo 1), who organizes a gastronomy project with her sister. After several return visits, I have found Dona Matilde to have an indomitable spirit and a generous smile; but that first day I met her, I was surprised by her fierce grassroots analysis of women's empowerment that came rapidly spilling out as soon as I turned on the recorder. On subsequent visits, she prepared a tea from herbs growing in the yard to settle my stomach. She introduced me to her elderly father. His cloudy eyes looked out over the horizon beyond the fields of the sierra as he told me that nowadays people are getting sick because they have lost their connection to the land and stopped growing and preparing their own food. The activities of saving and lending through a small-scale community credit union or of growing, grinding, and preparing food may seem like quotidian activities that have simply been collectivized, but they have become economically and politically important in the past few years as part of a FIOB campaign for the Derecho A No Migrar (the right not to migrate) (Rivera-Salgado 2014). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the agricultural fields of California, where an estimated 30 percent of all farmworker laborers are indigenous migrants from Oaxaca (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten 2010), the most effective organizers are trilingual, such as Irma Luna, a migrant from San Miguel Cuevas who is fluent in Mixtee, Spanish, and English and who began organizing in the 1990s (Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004). Reflecting on the history of women's participation in the FIOB on the occasion of the organization's twentieth anniversary, Irma Luna explained: Many barriers that migrant indigenous women face, especially those who work in agriculture, include the lack of transportation as many of them do not drive and more than that, they work from sun up to sun down. The families that do not have a license are limited in their participation in meetings and activities. Those who are mothers, return from their jobs and arrive home to feed the kids, do household chores, and prepare food for the next day. (1) (Rodriguez 2011,16-17) Migrant indigenous women in rural areas of California face many similar issues as their counterparts in rural Oaxaca in terms of transportation or access to political spaces. Yet, in the United States, migrant indigenous women face other intersectional oppressions that are compounded through the violence of producing a state of extreme vulnerability and exploitability in which many migrants are denied the right to get a driver's license. (2) I have picked these small vignettes to begin this essay in order to illustrate how activists with shared transborder goals--for example, women's participation and leadership--must navigate the local realities and arrangements of power to be effective, even while engaging in coordinated cross-border campaigns. …
This article describes the Mexican feminist movement over the last four decades as a multifaceted entity situated on the periphery of a multi-centered patriarchy, a subject that cannot be restricted to a single identity or political project because it is produced by a power that shape-shifts over time and depending on social context. The development of female malaise, identity, collective imagination, and social action is expressed as multiple paths toward destroying unjust genderrelations and producing more egalitarian and liberated relationships between women and men, either as an independent agenda or by integrating gender struggles into mixed organizations and more general projects for social transformation. (1) This definition of feminism allows the inclusion of processes commonly excluded from historiography and obliges us to use the plural, Mexican feminisms. The emergence of diverse feminist subjects has not been easy to understand or accept; feminisms have cleared their own paths through tense but rewarding relationships between distinct feminist viewpoints and between them and the social Lefts. Female subversion destabilizes the social order on several levels: the grand patriarchal capitalist power and the small but profound masculine strength within the couple, the community, and social organization. At the same time as feminism jumbles the global sex-gender system, it also disturbs its molecules--the closest and most intimate spaces--generating conflict between brothers and sisters that share a subordinate position in the macrosocial order. In this chain of tensions and powers the women's emancipatory processes are generated, and are also located in diverse dimensions and spaces. Here, I give priority to the analysis of the popular and indigenous feminist currents, which are omitted from a historiography of Mexican feminism (2) that tends to focus on historical feminism? a branch that emerged during the 1960s in liberal middle-class urban sectors, and whose vision, with renewed voices, is sustained to this day. I focus on popular and indigenous feminisms because they represent an other to historical feminism and, in my opinion, have greater emancipatory potential be cause the politicization of the gender/class and gender/class/ethnic injustices that intersect in the lives of their protagonists allows the development of proposals for radical change that seek to transform the deepest fabric of female subordination. In this perspective, historical feminism, which focuses on women as individual subjects in the struggle for gender rights and claims, hegemonizes the historiography of Mexican feminism from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. However, since the early 1980s, arose various feminist expressions have gone unrecognized by historians of feminism. As essential as historical feminism for understanding the expressions of the feminist movement are the popular movements, whose revolutionary class perspective was key to popular feminism, along with indigenous movements. They sought to overcome an economistic and dichotomous view of social classes to support a world inclusive of many worlds, within which indigenous feminism could develop. Popular and indigenous feminists are in dialogue with and coincide or confront historical feminism and the Lefts to which they belong. Through agreement and discord, they generate their own narratives, listen, question, defend, and modify their discourse and the discourse of their interlocutors. Historical Feminism The 1960s was the scene of the first wave of Mexico's developmentalism crisis, strong popular response, and new forms of political activism. These awakenings began with the Mexican Student Movement of 1968, which broke down the corporate control of the official party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) and constituted a new Left. Independent labor unions, the boom of the agrarian land movement, the emergence of the urban popular movement, and a critical and committed student movement simultaneously challenged the Mexican capitalist and political systems. …
The United Farm Workers' widely circulated publication, El Malcriado, was highly influential in shaping Chicano movement print culture and the way it visualized emerging conceptions of identity, community, and politics. Opening any issue from the 1960s or 1970s, a reader would be treated to an eclectic array of imagery: the political cartoons and caricatures of Andy Zermefio, photographs of rallies and protests, reproductions of prints by Mexican artists from Jose Guadalupe Posada to Leopoldo Mendez, images of deplorable living and working conditions, photographs identifying and exposing oppositional forces, and those that convey the resilience and determination of the organization and its constituency in the face considerable obstacles. El Malcriado constitutes a significant case study as it initially predated most Chicano/a publications, was foundational to the development of an identifiable Chicano/a print culture or aesthetic, and would eventually sustain an exchange with other publications through the Chicano Press Association (CPA). Just as important, the UFW would become a key training ground for Chicano/a artists and activists, who would carry these strategies and aesthetics to other contexts. As it operated within and outside the Chicano movement, its rhetorical address to various publics and constituencies is instructive and complex, distinct from, yet analogous to, the affinities and tensions apparent in other organizations. This essay examines the use of photography within El Malcriado, the various audiences it addressed, and the multiple, at times contradictory conceptions of community it aspired to construct. Accordingly, I build here upon my concept of the Chicano/a photographic, which accounts for the diverse, expansive uses of photography within the cultural production of a social movement, from the creation of images to their promiscuous circulation, juxtaposition, and reworking (see Gunckel 2015). By situating El Malcriado as an early, influential iteration of these practices, I conduct a visual analysis that accounts for a publication's rhetorical assumptions of audience or perceived circulation and the networks of solidarity they envisioned. This method allows us to consider how the intersection of these factors worked to construct unity between different kinds of social subjects, or, just as significantly, to mark the boundaries of this community. In other words, an analysis of the images in social movement print culture must account for what and whom they depict, how they do so, and, equally important, ask by whom and for whom these depictions were created. If, as John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen (1998,45) have argued, Cesar Chavez strategically crafted a reconstitutive discourse that would alter the character of various listeners to built community across difference, we might just as productively consider the ways in which El Malcriado fashioned an analogous visual address that envisioned this diverse community while revealing some of the tensions and exclusions implicit in its construction. At the same time, examining the broader contours of this visual address suggests the impossibility of isolating the potential meanings of any image from its relationships to multiple readerships, variable contexts, and the broader array of imagery and text within which it is embedded. The intent of adopting this expansive photographic framework is not to formulate an overarching thesis about Chicano/a or social movement photography as a monolithic tendency or a consistent set of practices or aesthetics. Indeed, recent exhibitions such as LA Xicano have demonstrated the diverse and at times unexpected nature of cultural production in this context, displaying work that often evades conventional frames of identity politics or ideological agendas (Noriega, Romo, and Tompkins Rivas 2011). Rather, this method allows us to more thoroughly chart the multifaceted nature of practice within the movement, and by extension, to rethink the way in which the medium has been mobilized within other social justice movements. …
case, Mellon was known as Britain's most aggressive, some say brutal, police chief. His district has the dubious distinction of using more tear gas than any other in the country. He admires Margaret Thatcher, whose prime ministerial reign included episodes of unprecedented police brutality against people of color, from Brixton to Toxteth, and against British miners. Mallon nonetheless feels that policing under the iron lady was soft. A villain will get up in the morning, steal a newspaper and a pint of milk from a doorstep, snatch someone' s bicycle and go on a shop-lifting spree, he explains. By lunchtime he will have committed a dozen (The Scotsman, 1997). His preferred artillery for this war on crime is imported from New York City: the doctrine known as tolerance. Zero tolerance stems from a two-decade-old study by two conservative social scientists who proposed the broken thesis: if people are allowed to break windows with impunity, not only do smaller crimes lead to more serious ones, but the disordered appearance of the neighborhood perpetrates criminal disorder (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). The geographic signs of disorder produce the disorder itself; zero tolerance for even minor crimes nurtures an anticrime environment. The study was written as U.S. liberal urban policy lay in decay, but it was only seriously applied in the 1990s when alternatives to that liberalism were being energetically constructed. Most inftuentially implemented in New York City by police chief William Bratton and Mayor Giuliani, zero tolerance was only part of a much larger shift in U.S. urban policy. The bankruptcy of liberal urban
During my 28 years of labor movement activism, I have served in every capacity within a local union. I have led and participated in organizing campaigns, contract negotiations, arbitrations, and strikes. Nevertheless, the parts of my union life that I remember best were the struggles to build democratic unions. Some might argue that the best and the worse about the American worker are revealed in the heat of struggles. They surface, for instance, during those rare acts of courage that might be seen in a violently contested organizing campaign or in a protracted and bitter strike. Yet, I best remembered those union members who gave years of their lives to build a union movement that represented all the workers. Although the pitched battle between the American working and international capital is fierce and bitter, an essential straggle for the advancement of the American working is taking place between members in unions. The continued effort by dedicated union activists to make their organizations models of democracy and engines for social justice is a long battle marked with conspicuous acts of courage by working-class people. The fiercest battles within trade are waged for union democracy and against racial and gender discrimination. Many authors have pointed to race and gender as major sources of fragmentation within the American working class. Historically, union leaders have viewed racial and gender diversity as a problem that hindered cooperative action, the formation of labor and the maintenance of unity within unions (Asher and Stephenson, 1990; Cobble, 1993). Among progressive scholars, it is generally agreed that corporate leaders understand the effect that racial and gender fragmentation has on the American working and use these divisions to advance their interests (Davis, 1986; Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, 1986). In an effort to extend our understanding of how unified social action emerges from a multiplicity of identities, this article uses a case study to examine the intersection of race, gender, and in a local public sector union. This study involved a local union in the public transportation industry. During the first period studied, 1970 through 1992, this union was transformed from a 124-member private-sector union, made up mostly of white male bus drivers, into a 1,800-member multiracial, multi-gender, multi-occupational union. It was a period of tremendous economic, political, social, and ideological change. It was marked by militancy, during which a rank-and-file movement for democracy unseated a 25-year incumbent president. This period also witnessed a change in the union leadership, from being a white-run union to a minority-led union. This study suggests that demographic changes in the work force set objective conditions for fragmentation to occur. Yet, the most decisive single variable in building working-class unity is the subjective factor, i.e., class-conscious leadership. By conscious, I mean leaders who interpret the U.S. as a social system divided by relationships: primarily, the working and capitalist class. Within this context, class-conscious leaders understand that the system of dominance is not simply one of capitalist domination over the working class, but also one characterized by racial and gender privilege. In other words, within classes, there exist structures and cultures of domination by which white males have a privileged position over racial minorities (women and men) and white women. In addition, white men and women share a favored position in the American social system over racial minorities (women and men). I argue that class is a requisite to effective working-class leadership. Such leadership recognizes that workers have multiple identities that are given meaning by their occupation, gender, and race. Ideological consciousness leads to activist strategies that create internal union coalitions aimed at increasing democratic participation. …
