Book Report: Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!

link to slides

On the surface level, the #TechWontBuildIt movement looks to be a movement focused on organizing engineers to stand up against unethical decisions made by company leadership. And the public is paying attention because the companies involved are big, household names in the tech industry (read: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.). However, at its core, the #TechWontBuildIt movement isn’t just made up of concerned software engineers; The movement sits at the intersection of a variety of older social movements, and the application of powerful software to control vulnerable populations is just the latest area of contention.

A prime example of this cross-movement collaboration is the Immigrant Rights movement. One of the sub-movements I investigate in my research is the #NoTechForICE movement that is specifically focused on pressuring tech companies to cancel their contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement due to the Trump administration’s invasive immigration policies. The Immigrant Rights Movement has long been calling attention to immigration issues, well before Trump took office. I chose Sasha’s book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets, because I wanted to read more about the Immigrant Rights movement and better understand the organizing tactics the activists used to build a successful movement.

“A key issue in this often blurred debate is the role of communication technologies in the formation, organization, and development of [social] movements.”  — Manuel Castells, Foreward

The book opens with an investigation of the media ecology of the Immigrant Rights movement in the first chapter. English language news channels failed to anticipate the power and scale of the movement and consequently provided spotty coverage. Instead, we saw Spanish language commercial broadcasters providing constant coverage of the movement and playing a crucial role in calling people to action. In addition to mass media, community-driven radio and media, streaming radio, social media also allowed activists to organize and gain public visibility.

In the second chapter, Costanza-Chock defines transmedia organizing as “the creation of a narrative of social transformation across multiple media platforms, involving the movement’s base in participatory media making, and linking attention directly to concrete opportunities for action.” She looks at the 2006 school walkouts as a case study and points to the student-driven organizing effort as an example of how transmedia organizing can engage participants in creating a shared narrative. Students made flyers, communicated and debated over MySpace, chatted over AIM and other chat clients, and taught one another how to transfer videos and photos from mobile devices to computers and upload them to the web.

Next, Costanza-Chock moves to talk about the power of framing and the importance of participatory media in amplifying the voices of protestors on the ground. During a peaceful rally in MacArthur Park (LA), riot police stormed the park and attacked the crowd, which included reporters from mass media outlets. The LAPD reframed the attack as a melee caused by a communication breakdown in the chain of command, and TV news showed the protestors in a negative and/or dehumanizing light by relying on a simplified conflict narrative of violent clashes between police and protestors. In response, activists produced their own media from footage shot by protestors on the ground, creating a true narrative of the events and allowing grassroots voices to be heard in their own words.

In chapter four, the book discusses media practices that were used during the APPO-LA protests in Oaxaca, Mexico to strengthen connections with communities abroad (particularly communities in LA). Activists were spreading media texts across platforms, and most importantly, into offline spaces (video sharing with VCRs and tapes). They took advantage of the fact that a movement can best use digital media when the base group is already familiar with the tools and practices of network culture. This type of media sharing was particularly important for a community that has one of the lowest levels of Internet access among all demographic groups in the US.

Low-wage immigrant workers have less access to media-making tools and skills than most people, so developing digital media literacy is an important goal for many community-based organizations (CBOs). In chapter five, Costanza-Chock calls out a number of CBOs that make a specific effort to increase digital media literacy. The Institute of Popular Education of Southern California and Garment Worker Center have both created popular education workshops around digital media. VozMob takes advantage of the widespread access to mobile phones and publishes a newspaper that can be posted to from mobile phones. These CBOs face challenges such as lack of funding, low training capacity, lack of familiarity with new tools, language barriers, lack of trust, and lack of time and energy to participate.

The sixth chapter investigates the various pathways into participation in social movements for young people, particularly undocumented youth (DREAMers). Some are introduced through participation in other politicized activity (fighting for access to education, fair trade, workers’ rights; mass mobilizations). Others are mentored by seasoned activists or pulled into media production, circulation, and reception. Costanza-Chock points out that participation in media making is a key entry point to further politicization and deeper involvement. Through media making, DREAMers have been able to tell their own stories and develop a strong public narrative.

Transmedia organizing can be incredibly impactful when executed properly. However, with the mainstreaming of transmedia organizing, we have seen well-funded groups create media with little accountability to the movement base. Chapter seven points to such projects, including Define American, a participatory video campaign started by Jose Antonio Vargas, the Dream is Now, a short film created by David Guggenheim and screened at the White House, and FWD.us, a media campaign launched by a group of Silicon Valley executives that uses cutting-edge online organizing tools. Misguided transmedia organizing can often choose poor framing or issue calls to action that miss the mark. In the best case, it means strategic failure. In the worse case, it means negatively impacting the movement’s goals.

 

Book Report: How Change Happens by Leslie Crutchfield

How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t

Slides available here.

Leslie Crutchfield, the author of How Change Happens, is the Executive Director of the Global Social Enterprise Initiative (GSEI) at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She has over 25 years of experience in organizational and nonprofit management. In the book’s introduction, Crutchfield incorrectly asserts that there has been limited progress in social movement literature in recent decades when there has in fact been a large amount of scholarly work in this space. Nonetheless, her book offers an intriguing “outsider’s view” into the world of organizing from the nonprofit perspective.

How Change Happens is organized into six chapters, each with a key takeaway for organizers. These are:

1. Turn Grassroots Gold
2. Sharpen your 10/10/10/20=50 Vision
3. Change Hearts and Policy
4. Reckon with Adversarial Allies
5. Break from Business as Usual
6. Be Leaderful

The organizations and campaigns Crutchfield focuses on in her case studies include Freedom to Marry, Truth Initiative, the National Rifle Association (NRA), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Campaign for Tabacco-Free Kids, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).

In the first chapter, Crutchfield outlines the importance of promoting and supporting grassroots activity by describing the NRA’s innovative strategy. Initially organized as an Election Volunteer Coordinate Program in 1994, the NRA’s grassroots strategy was so successful they stopped focusing on elections and launched a year-round grassroots program in 1998. Crutchfield explains that the NRA is successful “because they don’t just give the grassroots attention when there’s a bill up for consideration or a tight race for elected office; they maintain a visible and constant presence throughout the broader gun-enthusiast community.“ In other words, they turn grassroots gold.

The second chapter tells the story of the Freedom to Marry campaign, which was essentially able to “divide and conquer” in the national debate by allowing groups with different goals to pursue those goals in different states. This strategy illustrates a 10+10+10+20=50 approach to organizing by which movements are able to “ plow through all fifty states with their change campaigns, rather than focusing only on sweeping federal reforms.”

The third chapter, Change Hearts and Policy, focusing on MADD and the Truth Initiative to describe the way centering personal stories and lived experience can shift mainstream attitudes and behavior. Although Crutchfield doesn’t use the terminology of framing, she describes how MADD’s founder Candy Lightner was able to shift the then-dominant framing of drunk drivers as “innocent perpetrators of unintended murder or injury” to a frame in which drunk drivers are criminals.

The fourth chapter discussed the volatile relationships between the organizations behind the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. These disagreements came to a head during a crucial period of litigation in 1994, when leaders couldn’t agree on an appropriate settlement with big tobacco. Crutchfield summarizes the chapter by saying that “Social change is contentious and emotional; successful movements arise when leaders are able to put aside their differences and mobilize around common goals.”

The fifth chapter, Break from Business as Usual, suggests that business can be a powerful ally for social movement organizers. She tells this story by describing EDF’s development of the market-based cap and trade program to limit SO2 emissions.

The final chapter, Be Leaderful, suggests that successful movement must have both strong central leaders as well as local leaders. She returns to the story of MADD in this chapter, describing how the organization’s early success was largely dependent on the growth of a large network of locally organized and controlled chapters. This enabled supporters to pinpoint key local targets for action, such as local motor vehicle codes.

Crutchfield’s assessment of “how change happens” includes many parallels to traditional social movement scholarship, particularly in its focus on framing processes in chapter three and grassroots practices in chapter one. That said, expertise in organizational management also offers a fresh perspective on organizing. I particularly appreciate the strategic approach she suggests in the form of the 10+10+10+20=50 organizing strategy. I’d like to see this type of analysis applied to other movements, particularly those pertaining to government corruption and climate change.

Book Report: Social Movements and American Political Institutions

Link to Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DGrakXHHkZBmIyKU7uulJMYApTuoqLfV80jc89oNY9o/edit?usp=sharing

The book was edited by Andrew McFarland and Anne N. Costain. McFarland is a political science professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studies political participation and political consumerism as well as social movements. Anne Costain is a political science professor at University of Colorado, where she is studying nonviolence as a social movement tactic and “the legacies of the suffrage and anti-slavery movements for later movements challenging sexism and racism in America.”

It’s divided into six sections, each including two to three essays: Theories of American Politics and Social Movements, Mobilization, Parties and Election, The Presidency and Congress, Social Movements in Court, and Conclusions.

Book Report for Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

Link to slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10IZdLY_AHXlBG3Mdf9eMFpV7DgX-vMqClr7LTwq1ufc/edit?usp=sharing

The past two decades have seen innovation and entrepreneurship explode online. Nowadays, “any kid with a laptop and an idea can change the world”, such as Mark Zuckerberg. However, this new model of innovation is still generally limited to “the world of bits.” That’s starting to change. In his book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, Chris Anderson argues that it’s time to bring those same principals to the real world.

It used to be that failure in the world of “bits” was celebrated, a hallmark of entrepreneurship, but failure in the world of “atoms” had real weight. It’s easy to delete a website, but what if you have thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory sitting in a warehouse somewhere that nobody wants to buy? Thus, the everyday person could not participate in creating their own object in the world of atoms.

Nowadays, anybody with a good design can upload it and have it printed–just look at the success of Redbubble, Society6, and CustomInk. With the popularization of 3-D printers and such, you can even build your designs yourself. There are thousands of makerspaces around the world that are helping you do just that. We’re seeing a big cultural and economic shift in who has the means of production and thus power. Platforms like Kickstarter make it possible for anybody to create something awesome.

The author says that there’s three characteristics of the maker movement. First, people use digital desktop tools to create and prototype new designs. Second, there is a cultural norm to share those designs in online communities. Third, the foreshortening of the path between inventor and entrepreneur–anybody can upload and mass-produce a design.

So let’s take a step back. What’s an industrial revolution? You might know it as the famous Henry-Ford-era of mass production. Ultimately, industrial revolution occurs when new technology gives individuals power over the means to production.

The products that are on shelves today reflect the economic demands of retail, not the true range of human taste. The Internet did not democratize production, only distribution. That is, companies could start selling a larger variety of stock on Amazon. With this new maker movement, more people can participate in the supply chain.

So what tools are driving this new revolution? Let’s talk about desktop factories. The first is the famed 3-D printer; it’s very similar to a paper printer. It takes geometries on screen and transforms them to objects you can pick up and use. You might be most familiar with ones that use molten plastic, but 3-D printers also use glass, steel, etc. A CNC machine–CNC stands for computer numerical control–uses a drill bit to cut a product out of wood, metal, etc. Laser cutters use lasers to cut precise patterns into surfaces. 3-D scanners allow you to scan an object and transform it into a 3-D image.

Open source hardware is another driving force behind the maker movement, and like physical makerspaces with desktop factories, open source hardware can build communities. The author gives an example where designs from his platform, which was called 3D robotics, were translated into Chinese and sold on Taobao, the Chinese version of Amazon. Community members were shocked, but instead of threatening lawsuits, the author said that it was okay, because open source hardware is just that–open source. This led to another community member to step forward and admit he had been involved with this translation. He ended up getting involved with the US community, translating their wiki into Chinese for greater access.

Nowadays, so many prominent businesses start out as hobbies. Maker businesses like BrickArms, which creates LEGO accessories like guns and other weapons, bloom out of people’s garages and home offices. Thanks to the maker movement, we’re seeing a shift in who has the means of production.

Entrepreneurship has become democratized. Anybody can realize their own vision, Anderson argues. The future is being reinvented as we speak; he hopes to see you all there.

 

Book Report: The Fire Next Time

link to slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14cS7M3oftjS9J2whqsgne8jrDmin_ekfQTpkE_xwvwg/edit?usp=sharing

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water,
The fire next time”
Mary Don’t You Weep, Negro slave spiritual

The American civil rights movement is one of the most well-known social movements in U.S. history. A decades-long struggle over the country’s original sin of slavery and fraught relationship with race, the issues championed during the Civil Rights movement are still hot topics of today. It influenced many other movements, including the Black Power, Black feminist movement, Pan-Africanism, LGBTQ+, and Occupy Wall Street movements.

Since my project features race and its relationship to the #MeToo movement, I decided it would be appropriate for me to read up on America’s racial history. I was very familiar with Dr. King’s and Malcolm X’s works, but I wanted to focus on James Baldwin because I thought he was a bit overlooked compared to other leaders and thinkers of the time period.

Baldwin was a native of Harlem, the grandson of a slave, and son of a Baptist preacher. His book begins with a letter to his nephew on the 100th year anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. It was the peak of the civil rights movement, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech just around the corner. Yet, though Civil Rights activism was reaching a high point, racism was, of course, alive and well in America. Many citizens were still against desegregation, despite the fact a decade ago, the Supreme Court had ruled public school segregation as illegal.

Baldwin tells his nephew that he sees himself in him, and he sees his father — his son’s grandfather — in him. He says that his father believed what white people had told him his entire life — that he was subhuman, and worth less than a white man.

Baldwin warns his nephew against that kind of thinking, but acknowledges that in America’s current state, he must overcome a system that is set up against him. He says that white people will not accept him first, though it was white people who originally set up this system, and he must accept them first, unfair as it may seem.

Baldwin writes that true racial integration would only begin once white people in America truly learn and understand America’s dark history and its roots in slavery. We are celebrating freedom one hundred years too soon, says Baldwin.

Down at the Cross, the second essay in this book, takes a more autobiographical approach. Baldwin describes what it was like to grow up in Harlem, NYC’s historically black burough, and how he witnessed his friends become disillusioned by the options for their future — menial jobs with little pay, and no means to carve out their own paths in life. While they turned to drugs, crime, or other forms of distraction, Baldwin turned to religion. He became a dedicated member of the church, a different church than the one where his father preached, since their relationship was uneasy. But eventually, Baldwin comes to realize the same criticisms that he had of white supremacist structures were evident in Christianity.

He meets the leader of the Nation of Islam, an opposing religion gaining momentum in black communities. He rejects it as divisive and oppressive, the same way he rejected Christianity. The Nation of Islam believed that black people were the original people of the Earth, and all other races have black ancestry, and that black people would eventually reclaim America as their land and drive out white people.

Baldwin recognized that a one-race America was unrealistic and not something he wanted even if it were. But he empathized with how the ideology would appeal to black people, as black people are constantly told that they are worth less by society. A message that proclaimed them as supreme beings would draw many followers.

Baldwin believes that change will only happen if black people do not succumb to hate, and if all people love and accept one another as they are. He criticizes America’s “false progress” i.e. steps to freedom made only insofar they benefit the white power structure. He calls for politicians to stop making equality a tool for their own benefit, but to make equality a priority because it is the right thing to do, and the only way to create a healthy nation.

Baldwin ominously makes an analogy to the story of Noah in the Old Testament. In the Bible, God destroys the world through a massive flood because the people had been overcome by wickedness. He saves those who had not been wicked, however, including Noah and his family. God promises them with a symbolic rainbow to never destroy the earth again through flooding. This initial destruction can be compared to America’s Civil War.

But, as the spiritual points out, God only promised to not use water to destroy the earth. Fire is still a viable option, and it will be fire next time, unless America gets it together.

Children’s rights from below: A book summary

Liebel, M. (2012). Children’s rights from below: cross-cultural perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 272 pages.

In Children’s Rights from Below: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Manfred Liebel gathers together ten of his essays, including two that he co-wrote with Ivan Saadi, and three other essays from Karl Hanson, Wouter Vandenhole, and Saadi. Together, the authors answer in this book four sets of overlapping questions: How can children themselves exercise and enjoy their rights? What conditions should be created to enable the children’s exercise of these rights? What must happen so that children’s rights become relevant to the children, that children recognize the rights as relevant to themselves, and that they use these rights for their current and future lives? In what ways do the children need support and how can they claim such support?

In this book, Liebel and his companions do not address whether children can and should have rights or whether it makes sense to grant them these rights. Instead, the authors take these as given and move to address how the narrow focus of the children’s rights debates on the responsibilities of the states and on legal procedures, while important, has decontextualized children’s rights and has severely hindered an adequate reconceptualization of these rights. The debate has become technical, “on the most effective and efficient way to implement children’s rights, how best to monitor this implementation and how this can be organized” (p. 2, citing Reynaert et l., 2009, p. 528). The discourse has given little attention to the rights’ broader meaning and implication, the contexts and conditions of their creation and exercise, and their significance and relationship to the children as right-bearers (p. 1).

In this book, Liebel and his companions answer the overlapping questions and approach children’s rights as rights held and necessarily exercised by children. They particularly focus on rights that “open up an ensemble of concepts, practices and methods that can be and are used by children themselves in ways contributing to their own welfare” (p. 2). With practical intention, the authors put forward their answers and approaches in 13 essays divided into four parts.

The first part, “Contexts of Children’s Rights Discourses,” explains the perspective on children’s rights that the authors have taken in this book. The first of the three chapters, all written by Liebel, in this part, “Framing the Issue: Rethinking Children’s Rights,” gives an overview of the main arguments for a rethinking of the children’s rights discourse. The rethinking involves moving beyond the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that was drafted based on European theories of childhood, premised on children’s difference from adults and the children’s need of protection, and without the participation of children. This also involves questioning not only the universal validity of the UNCRC but also how these rights can move beyond law and its administration. Children must perceive these rights as theirs, realize and claim these rights, and have these realizations and claims recognized.

The second chapter, “Hidden Aspects of Children’s Rights History,” brings to light some hidden and overlooked aspects of the history of children’s rights. By hidden and overlooked, Liebel means the movement in the history of children’s rights that strove for the equality and participation of children in society that ran separately, until recently, from the movement that emphasized the protection of children and later the guaranty of their dignified living conditions. The latter movement has a long history but found “first marked expression” in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child by the League of Nations in 1924 (p. 32) and continued in many international agreements until the UNCRC. The former, the movement for the equality and participation of children, also found expression in the UNCRC but this movement is of a younger age, with exceptions, and it is on this that Liebel focuses this chapter on.
Except for the pamphlet of Thomas Spence (1750-1814), a person tagged as a radical advocate of the common ownership of land, the first document in the West to expressly promote the self-determination rights of children was the Moscow Declaration of Children’s Rights in 1918. The organization, Free Education of Children, which was founded during the Russian revolution, introduced this document advancing children’s equality to adults “in freedoms and rights at all ages,” when not lacking in physical and mental abilities (p. 34), and their participation.

The other exception that Liebel notes is that of many non-Western countries. These countries, like those in Africa and Meso and South America, have customs that have been there for centuries where capacities and certain tasks, which to Western understanding are reserved for adults, are assigned to children. In the highlands of Bolivia and Peru, for example, ten- or twelve-year old children are elected to be mayors. In some African and South American regions, children handle and take responsibility for pieces of land or for cattle at very young ages.

The third chapter, “Children’s Rights Contextualized,” discusses different pitfalls in reference to children’s rights as well as action points to make rights accessible and valuable to children. To demonstrate the pitfalls, Liebel cites extensively the cases of the children living and working in the streets in Guatemala and India, the children who arrive as refugees in Europe separated from their parents or adult guardians, and the child-headed households in Africa. For adults, the best interest of the children is clear in these cases, the adults being traditionally protectionists; but to the children who are in these situations, their best interest is the support to thrive in these situations. Children’s rights, as they are stipulated in the UNCRC and understood, have not been useful among these children. Thus, to Liebel, the task is not merely to implement formally existing rights but to ensure that these implementations align with the cultural, political and structural contexts of the children and weighed against the possible consequences to children’s lives.

After explaining the perspective on children’s rights that they have taken in this book, the authors spend the second part, “Theoretical Perspectives,” to present theoretical perspectives that they hope would contribute to the further conceptualization of children’s rights. There are four chapters under this part and the first chapter, Chapter 4, “Schools of Thought in Children’s Rights,” is authored by Karl Hanson. In this chapter, Hanson identifies four schools of thought in children’s rights that can be considered as belonging to a continuum bookended by the paternalist school on one end and liberationist on the other. The other two, falling between these ends, are the welfarist and emancipist schools. Paternalist school views children as dependent, human becomings—not human beings—who are generally incompetent to make rational decisions and thus, in need of protection and special rights. Liberationist school, which could be labelled as anti-paternalism, considers children as “independent actual citizens (beings) who are competent to make well-founded, rational decisions” and have participation and equal rights with adults (p. 73). Welfarist and emancipist schools fall between these two ends of the continuum and hold that children are both human becomings and beings. In terms of competence, both schools consider children incompetent unless proof to the contrary is presented: in the welfarist school, the burden of proof lies on those in favor of recognizing children’s competence and in the emancipist, on those not in favor.

Walter Vandenhole authors the next chapter, Chapter 5, “Localizing the Human Rights of Children.” In this chapter, Vandenhole begins from the observation that standard-setting on children’s rights have been traditionally top-down. Representatives of states drafted the UNCRC in the 1980s and promulgated it in 1990. From then on, states have been trying to implement UNCRC’s stipulations on the ground and the UN agencies monitor these implementations. Vandenhole notes that this top-down process has been challenged as nonresponsive to specific and local challenges and is impervious to how people on the ground receive the rights. Vandenhole, therefore, argues for a localization of children’s right. Following the theoretical work of Koen De Feyter (2007 and 2011) and the methodological work of Gaby Oré Aguilar (2011) in general human rights, Vandenhole argues for making children’s local needs and issues the starting point for the further interpretation and elaboration of the normative children’s rights and for the development of actions on children’s rights. The objective is to inform and transform the global norm on children’s rights. To do this, to impact global norm-setting in children’s rights, Vandenhole identifies four actors whose linkage with each other are necessary: community-based organizations to national children’s rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to international children’s rights NGOs, and to governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Liebel comes back to write Chapter 6, “Discriminated Against Being Children: A Blind Spot in the Human Rights Arena.” He begins this chapter with two epigraphs: the first, a story of a 12-year old who called for an ambulance but was not entertained by the respondent because she (the gender of the child was not mentioned) was not an adult and the second, a story of a 16-year old who walked into a shop and was followed around inside by the security guard. From these stories, Liebel highlights the recent attention that age-based discrimination has attracted after having been sidelined from the debate and research about human and children’s rights for a long time. For him, this reality points to a questioning on the normal separation and subordination of childhood as a phase and as an age group. This is also a challenge: children are perceived more clearly as subjects and agents but are still hindered from obtaining social status that would further their opportunities and allow them to exert influence.

Chapter 7, “Children’s Rights and the Responsibilities of States: Thoughts on Understanding Children’s Rights as Subjective Rights,” identifies some shortcomings of the currently state-focused rights system for children. These shortcomings stem from the reality that many children find children’s rights as alien concept—they are not using them—and the reality that the one empowered to act on their rights are not the children themselves but the states and institutions. The chapter authors Liebel and Saadi, thus, advance the idea to go beyond the codification of rights and work towards making the children’s rights as subjective rights of children.

The authors put forward two broad categories of engagement innovations that would provide alternatives for the realization of the subjective rights of children. One category, “immanent innovations,” includes innovations that strengthen the influence and decision-making powers of the rights bearers on extant laws and policies and within the existing human rights system. Examples of this type of innovation include the proposed introduction of an individual complaints mechanism into the international rights framework and the emergence of children’s councils and fora at the national and regional levels. The other category, “transformative innovations,” includes innovations demonstrated in the emergence of children’s rights-related practices and strategies independent of the state. These include self-help groups of children and children social movements. For Liebel and Saadi, this latter type of innovations has the potential “to achieve a more fundamental reordering of the social and economic relations that condition the situation of children’s rights” (p. 118).

After the introduction and the presentation of theories, the authors of the book get into answering the more practical questions in the next part, part three, “Practical Perspectives.” In this part, the authors explore the following questions in four chapters: What drives children to frame demands in a language of rights? How, in doing so, can they also go beyond the codified rights? Why is it important to recognize and enforce these demands? The first chapter of this part, Chapter 8, “Grassroots Children’s Rights,” presents various examples of children’s rights, formulated by the children themselves as individuals and collectives, coming from at least 28 different countries from all continents. Liebel, who again authors this chapter, emphasizes the significance of what the children thinks about their rights as it is their lives that are affected and therefore, their thoughts are a source of validity and appropriateness of extant codified rights. One consequence of this process is that children’s views of their rights can differ from the views of the adults but dismissal of these views on whatever grounds are not options anymore as unveiled by the new social childhood studies. Another consequence is that these views may not be explicitly rights claims and in the terminology of rights discourse for “codified laws never provide a sufficient particular and specific problems and life situations of children” (p. 141).

In the next chapter, Chapter 9, “Children’s Rights as ‘Work in Progress’: the Conceptual and Practical Contributions of Working Children’s Movements,” Ivan Saadi presents the examples of the working children’s movements and organizations in different non-Western countries from different continents to argue that children’s rights is still a work in progress. The case of the child workers and the children’s workers movements is contentious within the children’s rights movement for, among others, while important segments in the movement are working towards the eradication of child labor and have not been giving space for the voice of the working children, working children’s organizations are pursuing for the children’s right to work. Another source of contention are the gaps between the official exegesis of and expectations on these rights and the definitions and interpretations of these rights that children themselves created. However, the actions of the organized working children are realizing improvements for their own and other children’s lives and they are impacting the codified rights as well.

In Chapter 10, “Cultural Variations in Constructions of Children’s Participation,” Liebel and Saadi discuss concepts and practices of participation in different cultural, economic, and political contexts. They ask and put forward answers to the following questions: Can the codified participatory rights be understood and implemented in an intercultural sense? Can children’s agency in non-Western cultures be understood as potentially transformative rights exercised by children? They also ask whether the cases of children, who in their non-Western countries assume economic and political responsibilities, presented in this chapter, can be conciliated with how participation stipulated in the UNCRC, particularly Article 12, is understood. The authors particularly highlights the case of the protesting children in Loxicha, Mexico that Anne-Marie Smith wrote about in 2007.

Smith wrote that from 1997 to 2001, the Loxicha children joined their mothers and other relatives in setting up protest camp in front of the government buildings in Oaxaca City to protest the arrest of their fathers, brothers and uncles, around 150 of them, accused of being part of the rebel group Popular Revolutionary Army (Ejército Popular Revolucionario). The children and their families were Zapotec who lived in San Agustín Loxicha, a rural area located 160 kilometers south of Oaxaca City (“Google Maps,” n.d.). The children took part in the marches, sit-ins and hunger strikes but also continued to play, work and go to school (Smith, 2007, pp. 34 & 38). This type of children’s participation, as Smith (2007) contends, however, is “not envisaged by the CRC and its ideals” (p. 52).

Liebel and Saadi ask the same question that Smith asked and scholars and child rights advocate have been exerting effort to delimit what constitutes child participation. But, Liebel and Saadi caution about constraining the notion of participation as it poses the risk of muting many instances of children’s participation in different social spheres.

In the last chapter of part three, Chapter 11, “Children’s Citizenship – Observed and Experienced,” Liebel returns as a solo author to explore different concepts of citizenship that would enable children to participate fully in all social matters and in their own free will. He presents three concepts of citizenship that can be applied to the case of the children: citizenship-as-practice, citizenship from below, and difference-centered citizenship. Citizenship-as-practice considers citizenship as not a result from a learning or maturity process as citizenship-as-achievement, its contrast, does. Citizenship-as-practice recognizes that life experiences, from the cradle to the grave, not only qualify all people, including children, to take part in society and demand their integral role in society but also supply opportunities to socially participate. Citizenship from below is similar to citizenship-as-practice but “takes into account the structures and power relations which impact upon this life” (p. 186). This means, with the knowledge that they are deprived of their rights, the children act as if they are already full pledged citizens. Difference-centered citizenship accounts for the difference between adults and children, which are both biological and socially constructed. In this kind of citizenship, children are equal citizens with the right to belong as “differently equal” members of society (p. 189, citing Lister, 2006, p. 25).

Although these concepts show a demand for change in the recognition, freedom and equality of children, Liebel questions how these can be put into practice; “in other words, how the latent citizenship present in children’s everyday activities can be transformed into a manifest citizenship, granting children direct influence on decision-making” (p. 193). This question, according to Liebel, is directly linked to the question of autonomy. To the children, especially the socially disadvantaged and marginalized, citizenship can only become practice if they are able to assert their own individual and collective interest in society even when these interests are not aligned with those of the adults and this can begin through children empowerment projects.

The last part of the book, Part IV, “New Frameworks for Children’s Rights from Below,” contains two chapters all written by Liebel. The first chapter, Chapter 12, “The Role of Children in Shaping New Contexts of Children’s Rights,” presents three areas where children’s roles are pushing the boundaries of their rights and definitions of childhood: child protagonism, children as actors in the economy, and child researchers. By child protagonism, Liebel means children’s involvement in social movements not only in the case of movements of children that push for children’s rights and welfare but also in the case of movements for the betterment of the general society. Children have also been actors in new modes of economy and have become researchers on their own behalf.

In the last chapter of the book and of this part, Liebel discusses two roles that adults should assumed given the areas where children are pushing the boundaries of their rights and the definitions of childhood. At the onset, Liebel asserts that adults are important in the realization of children’s right and adults should support the children and there are already many given reasons for this. But, adults should insist on the independence of children and should understand of their, the adults’, role as co-protagonist.

Book Review: Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas

In Twitter and Tear Gas, Tufekci offers an insightful analysis of the recent wave of networked social movements. Tufecki grounds her analysis on her personal experiences as a participant, participant observer, and ally in several antiauthoritarian uprisings, including the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, and the Occupy movement in the US. Her analysis is further informed by on-the-ground interviews with activists and protest participants.

Tufekci argues that in order to understand the new movements like the Gezi Park protests of 2013, the Tahrir Square protests of 2011, or the Occupy movement, we have to comprehend the evolving landscape in which political culture and digital technologies interact in complex ways. These new movements may be indiscernible from pre-digital protests like those of the civil rights movements in terms of their visible forms and intermediate outputs (e.g. street protest size), yet they form and operate quite differently from past protests.

A key contribution of this book is the development and application of capacities and signals framework to social movements. Adapting Amartya Sen’s “capabilities” approach from the field of development, Tufekci emphasizes the analytical shift needed from outputs and outcomes (such as protest size and number of protests) to capacities underlying movements. Tufekci in particular highlights three kinds of social movement capacities that are critical to the exercise of collective power: their capacity to set a narrative (narrative capacity), disrupt the operations of an existing system (disruptive capacity), and achieve changes in elections and/or institutions (electoral and/or institutional capacity). Seen through the lens of capacity formation, the Tahrir Square protest of 2011 had strong narrative and disruptive capacities but had weak electoral capacity, partly due to the political culture that is rooted in institutional distrust. Electoral and/or institutional capacity is something that Tufekci sees consistently underdeveloped in the new wave of antiauthoritarian movements. Further, Tufekci suggests that how movements signal their capacities to those in power and how these signals are interpreted matter greatly for movement trajectories.

Tufekci traces the power and weaknesses of newer movements to both the political culture and digital technologies. Tufekci makes an important observation that terms like “networked public sphere” and “networked social movements” do not signify “online only” or even “online primarily.” The dynamics of public spheres and the ways movements operate have been reconfigured by the introduction of digital technologies. This reconfiguration broadly affects not just online activities, but online, offline, and hybrid instantiations of public spheres and social movement activities. To illustrate, in the case of Egypt in 2011, even though only 25% of the population was online, they altered the contours of public discourse across the whole society by sharing  what they saw online with their networks through other means as well (face-to-face conversations, phone calls, or texting).

Tufekci also highlights the ways in which digital technologies have heightened the “attention economy” where human attention has become a scarce, but hotly sought-after commodity in a landscape marked by information glut (see Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchant). Tufekci approaches social movements as a fight for attention, and conceptualizes censorship as denial of attention through various means. Focusing on shifts in attention as a key analytical construct proves to be fruitful in explaining movement trajectories and tactics, as well as government responses to protests. In the years leading up to the Gezi Park protests, social media provided a means of bringing attention to news that were denied attention in the mainstream media. Participants in Black Lives Matter succeeded in shifting the amount of attention paid to police brutality by tweeting images of police violence. In response, some state actors learned to adjust their tactics for containing the protests over time. In China, the government employs tactics that deny and divert attention, for example, by flooding public spheres with other attention-grabbing news in times of protests.

Tufekci discusses how modern networked movements, thanks to social media, can gather momentum and scale up in a matter of few days. In contrast, older movements like the March in Washington in 1963 were organized over long periods of time, during which people learned to work together, build trust, and develop capacities for collective decision-making. Protests in the Gezi Parks or the Tahrir Square did not undergo such a capacity-building process to establish what Tufekci calls “network internalities,” the internal gains achieved by movement networks as network actors learn to act together and develop collective decision-making processes over time.

Such weaknesses are deeply intertwined with the participatory and horizontal culture of modern movements that emphasizes individual expression and eschews formal organizations. The Gezi Park protests, for example, were leaderless by design. Many showed up to the protests representing their own voices and selves, and the point precisely was that they were not being represented by another. When the government of Turkey was ready to negotiate with the people during the Gezi Park protests, the protesters did not have mechanisms to make demands and decisions collectively. Thus, such movements often run into “tactical freezes” after the initial expansion phase, when shifts in tactics are needed at critical juncture points.

This thought-provoking book takes the reader through various social movements with vivid encounters and memorable stories. Tufekci convincingly argues that the defining features of modern networked movements are not merely by-products of technology, but also deeply rooted in the political culture. Key contributions of this book include the many concepts and analytical frameworks the author develops to shed light on longer-term trajectories of networked social movements.

Review: #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa

“Makwerekwere, a mostly derogatory term for a perceived stranger who is most likely to be mistaken for ‘one of us’ “

In this timely, brilliant book, Francis Nyamnjoh uses the Rhode Must Fall (RMF) protests as a starting point to ask questions about citizenship and belonging in South Africa and Africa. He argues that the nation state of South Africa, much like Cecil Rhodes, is preoccupied with making visible certain kinds of citizenship. Cecil Rhodes granted this visibility based on how far the native sons and daughters he encountered matched up to the “imperial will and tastes of the British”. The South African state on the other hand, uses “bounded notions of culture and geography” to grant visibility to its citizens. These notions have been shaped by a history of “visible and invisible mobilities”. Nyamnjoh traces this history of mobilities that have produced a shifting set of makwerekwere, from Cecil Rhodes to current day black Africans outsiders to understand the RMF movement.

Nyamnjoh claims that Cecil Rhodes and his ilk were the original makwerekwere who came to South Africa unbidden, and conquered the land and its people with violence and cunning. The unequal encounter between colonizers like Rhodes and the native daughters and sons led to the creation of hierarchies of ‘whiteness’ that now have “less to do with skin pigmentation” and more to do with the “privileges and opportunities that come with power and its culture of control and authority”. Not even independence from colonizers have been enough to destroy these hierarchies that have been internalized over years of subjugation.

Nyamnjoh describes the creation of these circles of exclusion by Cecil Rhodes in Chapter 1: ‘Sir Cecil John Rhodes: The makwerekwere with missionary zeal’. He shows how even though Cecil Rhodes came as a makwerekwere, he used a “racism of exploitation and elimination” to turn the native South Africans he encountered into makwerekwere on their own land. To add insult to injury, Rhodes and his ilk erected monuments to indelibly etch their presence on the land they had stolen.

Nyamnjoh goes to on to show that even after independence, a resilient colonialism still preys on South Africa. He draws heavily from literature, academia and other forms of media to compellingly make his case about blacks still trapped in the never ending game of ‘whitening up’ and harboring fantasies of ‘whitening’ up, with the rules of the game still controlled by the ultimate gatekeepers of ‘whiteness’, whites themselves.

The education system in South Africa, in particular, despite all the promise that independence brought, still clings to the dichotomies of ‘civilized’ versus ‘primitive’, ‘insider’ versus ‘outside’, that are legacies of the colonial system. This manifests itself in the composition of staff and students, the diversity of the curriculum and even the physical structure of universities themselves. This legacy  has frustrated any hope of ‘self-determination’ by the new denizens of the Rainbow nation.

On 9 May, 2015, Chumani Maxwele with two placards hung around his neck reading, ‘Exhibit A: White arrogance, Exhibit B: Black assimilation’, threw excrement on the statue of Cecil Rhodes still looming large over the University of Cape Town (UCT). This act was the start of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. This movement calls for decolonization of UCT through the diversification of the curriculum, increasing the number of black students and staff, and the fall of the statue of Rhodes and other colonial relics.

Nyamnjoh provides a detailed and useful view of the movement, its methods and the response of the mass media, university authorities and the different political parties in South Africa. His account is balanced, and even though he lauds the movement and its aims, he also reveals that the movement has been criticized for  its patriarchal structure and its lack of inclusion of trans and queer voices.

Nyamnjoh adds another dimension to his analysis of the RMF protests by drawing in the question of ‘citizenship’ into the discussion. The RMF movement is primarily about the lack of representation of black South Africans rather than all black Africans. It is a movement to specifically rid South Africa of the “residual makwerekwere of yesteryear”. He thus questions the distinction between decolonization, and South-Africanization and Africanization.

In this context, he speaks about concurrent events happening in South African black townships, where impoverished South African masses called for the removal of the new makwerekwere: black Africans who have come from the ‘heart of darkness’ to South Africa; as they claimed these new outsiders were stealing their jobs. These individuals are not protected by the South African state: as evidenced by the statements made at that time about the political elite. He states that the system”thrived on freezing individuals into citizens and subjects depending on whether their lives were governed by the civic regime of laws, or by culture and tradition.” The system thus paid scant notice of “straddlers”.

He crucially, connects this with the RMF movement and questions whether this movement is perpetuating this “zero sum game of violence” in its methods and calls for a more in-depth discussion on this.

“Mobility is at the heart of being human”.

Due to increased mobility, Nyamnjoh argues, that we shift between makwerekwere and insiders based on context. He illustrates this creatively by including a piece of fiction in his novel, Chapter 6: ‘Pure Fiction: What I almost had in common with Rhodes’. He also includes two epilogues by Moshumee Teena Dewoo and Sanya Osha that boslter this point

He questions how “accommodating” the makwerekwere of the past will be of the new vanguard of South Africans. He questions how South Africans have to reconcile themselves with their past and its legacy of structures such as language. He then questions how South Africa will deal with the future: Will it subscribe to the current system of oppression where the “next oppressor is a level below the current one”, or will South Africa be able to develop a new kind of citizenship that will accommodate “straddlers” and provides for a conviviality that is “conscious of and critical of the hierarchies that make a mockery of the judicial-political regime of citizenship.”

He leaves the reader with these questions.

Book Report: Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

The book: Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs written by Mark Dery in 1993 looks to theorize and historicize the concept of Culture Jamming by understanding its history and philosophical foundations. To undertake that endeavor, Mark Dery structures his conceptual inquiry in four book chapters that look to understand the theory, context, and future of the concept.

   In the first chapter Empire of Signs, Dery starts by contextualizing and providing the socio-historical and economical panorama that made possible the multiplicity of culture jamming practices we know today. He argues that with the spread of TV usage in 70’s, the image became incredibly important in how we as a society understand and consume information. Furthermore, he believes that the expansion of corporate owned media, the development of media conglomerates, the supersession of the information economy from the formal economy,  created the material and ideological conditions that would provoke incredible discontent with corporations as intuitions and ignite the cultural was against them.

   In the second chapter: Culture Jamming, he explains the origins of the jamming concept: as the practice of intercepting radio conversations with noise and how Negativland coined the use of Cultural Jamming, in a 1984 JamCon, to describe the alteration of imagery referring particularly to Billboards.  Furthermore, he explains how the predominant status of imagery to shape public discourse fostered the use of imagery alteration as a political tool against corporations by introducing other interpretations on the ideas sold by capitalist institutions. Basically, using the imagery and tools that corporations used to promote and envelop society in consumerist culture against them in order to promote critical thinking for a more just and equal society.Moreover, Dery explains some of the techniques deployed by culture jammers to intercept consumerist messages 1)Snipping – dissemination of anti ads 2) Media Hoxing- creating pranks the media believes, 3) Audio Agitpropt- digital sampling that challenges copyright law, and 4)Billboard Banditry- “damaging” corporate billboards to display subversive ideas to corporate ideology.

   In the third chapter,  Guerrilla Semiotics  Dery explains how semiotics (the study of sign process and meaningful communications)  is employed in non-academic forms by activists in what Umberto Ecco called Guerrilla Semiotics (a technique to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute culture’s secret language or systems of signification) to alter our understanding of corporate messaging and capitalist ideology.

Finally chapter four, Postscript from the Edge talks about the future of signs, images and culture in the context of the electronic frontier and interactive media as substitutes for TV. In the chapter, He poses more questions than answers. He wonders: who is going to able to participate in the production? Will it be helpful for further critique or detrimental? Will it further promote consumer culture or limit it? Nevertheless, he ends up on a hopeful note. He states that even though cyberspace might have its faults (underrepresentation/harassment of minorities, etc) it can be seen as a more democratic space for cultural production and for the dissemination of transgressive communications.

Dery’s theoretical development of the culture jamming concept allows us to understand its uses as a political tool as well as its origins. Furthermore, it allows us to understand the power that mediated information has in construction public opinion and shaping power structures in our organized society. The concepts that he presents are incredibly useful to understand not only our political and ideological concept but how we can perform engage mediated politics in the future.

Bibliography

Dery, Mark. 1993. “Mark Dery › Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs.” http://markdery.com/?page_id=154.

Saving Florida by Leslie Kemp Poole: A Book Report

Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century by Leslie Kemp Poole (2015)

About the Author

Leslie Kemp Poole is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. A writer and historian, she achieved a PhD in History from the University of Florida. Prior to academia, she was a reporter for several newspapers and is also a freelance writer. Her interests are in the role of women in the environmental movement (the subject of this book).

Methods

Saving Florida is published by the University Press of Florida. As such, the book is very academic in nature, including endnotes, a bibliography and index at the back of the book. That said, the book is written for a popular audience; the text is accessible to readers with little background and the language is engaging. Poole includes plenty of quotes in her text, not solely from academics, but also quotes contemporary to her subject. She situates the events in the book with brief consideration of national events, such as pertinent national policy decisions and the activities of national organizations like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Poole writes this book using resources gathered from historical societies, women’s and garden clubs, museum and college archives, newspapers, interviews and “formal oral histories.” The focus of the book is on women and the environmental movement, as such, much discussion of the role of men is limited and lacks strong discussion of the African American community, whose goals were oriented at improving quality of life rather than protecting the environment. These missing viewpoints are acknowledged by Poole in the introduction, as well as those of the state’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indian perspectives. The missing points of view reflect not just a lack of current literature on the subject, but also the deficiency with which state and local entities interacted and discoursed with those populations during the 20th century.

Synopsis

Poole centers her discussion around numerous female leaders within their communities. Oftentimes these women have political power before starting their environmental campaigns. For example, Katherine Bell Tippetts was a “well-educated widow of a foreign correspondent” who took control of her husband’s hotel and real estate when he passed and May Mann Jennings, married to a former governor of Florida and daughter to a businessman who was very involved in Florida’s politics. In the later half of the 20th century, leading activists like Diane Dunmire Barile, who earned a master’s in ecology, had an academic background in science. The fight for environment protections started out heavily in grassroots movements that necessitated large-scale organizing and petitioning of governments. This evolved, after many federal and state laws were enacted, into fundraising for legal battles; around this time the larger organizations dwindled as single-issue, locally oriented. This shift occurred as women were gaining political power on local scales across the nation and an understanding of ecology was forming.

At the turn of the 20th century, women had a well-defined role in “municipal housecleaning.” Women, at the time, “considered the home and garden their domain,” and engaged in women’s clubs, expanding their role to wider community issues. Poole argues that this instilled an idea that women were the moral voice of the community, and their responsibility extended beyond their home. They increasingly saw the environment as part of their domain, as they saw it as their duty to ensure they lived in a clean environment. They were initially driven to maintain the beauty of the nature that compelled them to reside in the state, and later in the century, when pollution was rampant, the frame evolved into women needing to clean up men’s mess.

Saving Florida is divided into three parts. Part I, “Working through women’s groups,” deals with the start of the conservative movement in Florida and the nation, covering the early 20th century. This section is valuable within social movement theory for Poole’s coverage of the tactics used by women’s clubs to force policy decisions at a time when women were disenfranchised and largely not taken seriously by men in power. This section highlights the strength of grassroots activism and framing. Framing comes into play as different messages are needed to convince women and men for the cause due to the gendered roles of society at the time.

Part II, “Operating in Female-Male Groups,” covers the middle to late 20th century, when the science of ecology is developing and women are defining new roles within the political sphere. A rise in the prevalence of science and lobbying is immediately evident. Poole goes into more detail on a number of big projects during this section than the previous. During this time, federal regulations are passed to combat pollution. Rather than using strength of numbers, as they had done in the early 20th century, women were in public office and positioned to have a voice in traditionally male-dominated circles.

Part III, “Women Take the Lead,” is largely a closing section, wrapping up with chapters on environmental justice and important women leaders not previously mentioned. The coverage within these chapters include more national context than the in the previous sections, and are included moreso for completeness. Poole uses these chapters to discuss the role of African American women and Florida’s Indian population during the time period.

Part I: “Working Through Women’s Groups”

Poole starts the book talking about Audubon societies. Named after the ornithologist James Audubon, Audubon societies sought protection of birds. Women’s fashion of the late 19th to early 20th century included hats displaying feathers or bird parts. Because of this, birds were hunted aggressively across the nation as it was very profitable. Clara Dommerich, a wintering resident of Florida helped to establish the Florida Audubon Society (FAS) based on Audubon societies in other states. While protecting the birds was certainly on the mind of some members, many Florida residents moved there due to the beauty and nature of Florida, so loss of the songbirds directly impacted that aesthetic value. According to Poole. “women carried much of the organizational workload” within FAS. FAS distributed reports and leaflets throughout the state and had many success including establishing the first federal bird reservation in the United States through appealing to President Theodore Roosevelt (the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge).

One example Poole gives of the methods used by Audubon societies involves Katherine Bell Tippets. Tippets, with the help of other women, presented to the state legislature a seventy-foot long petition of signatures to convince an all-male legislature to pass a measure protecting the robin. Additionally, the members of societies like FAS or the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs (FFWC) worked closely with newspapers to publish articles and statements. In this way, they could educate the public or rebuke their opponents unfounded claims. Poole writes, “by contributing articles to local newspapers and women’s club publications, Tippetts kept her message at the forefront.” Other tactics involved sending letters and telegrams to congressional leaders — which would be very convincing with the large number of members within these women’s clubs. Another involved “invoking Lysistrata” whereby women threatened to withhold, in this example, pie, from those in the legislature until their demands were met.

There were many efforts at this time to designate certain plots of lands as state parks, and to preserve the state’s forests, that were disappearing due to unregulated logging. Even after winning policy and being granted funds, the women’s clubs often had to continue to fight in order to ensure that all of the funds were given to them. When presenting their argument, the women general gave two arguments: One focusing on the aesthetic value of nature, appealing to maternal senses, and another exhorting economic benefits in hopes to appeal to the male psyche.

This section concludes with a chapter on city beautification efforts. This chapter is one of the few points in the book where Poole acknowledges the African American community. She gives nod to Eartha M. M. White, for working hard to secure a playground in an era “burdened by Jim Crow laws.” An important reminder that much of the progress was won in white communities, and rarely extended to the disenfranchised African Americans.

Part II: “Operating in Female-Male Groups”

Poole makes it very clear in within this section that ecology is not well understood throughout Florida (or the United States) at this point in history. Having land set aside as a state park did not ensure that it was maintained as a natural environment with native plants. Drainage of swamps was considered acceptable; benefits of forest fires were unthinkable. This is an important realization, as what was a good conservation effort in the 1920s could be considered unacceptable nowadays and establishes the importance of the science of ecology. This section sees the rise of science in convincing legislatures to impose regulations and shifting public opinion, notably with the release of Silent Spring in 1966. Women are gaining political equity and further disrupting the dominant male hegemony.

Pollution is a major issue that arises in this section and threatened Florida’s aesthetic appeal, water supplies and health of residents. With Florida’s population booming only after the second world war, Floridians weren’t caught off guard as much as the big cities in the northeast and midwest were. Despite that, the phosphate industry was strong within the state and could devote a lot of money to lobbying, situating itself as a big opponent of the environmental movement. The phosphate industry resulted in eutrophication in many lakes and rivers, disrupting the natural balance within those ecosystems. Outside the phosphate industry, sewage dumping was very common. From Poole’s framework, women were key in changing public opinion, as the male-dominant government considered pollution as a side effect of progress. Much of the debate was conservation versus industry.

Marjorie Harris Carr was a persistent activist who sought to stop the construction of a canal through North Florida. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was constructing the Cross Florida Barge Canal. Carr used scientific knowledge, economic and legal research, expert testimony, a grassroots letter writing campaign and public education to warn the public of the dangers of this project, which was well underway by the time the public was concerned. Unconvinced, state officials voted to continue the project, and a furious Carr “turned her kitchen into  the campaign’s command center, complete with a whirring Xerox machine.” She sought support from news media and scientists. She portrayed herself as a housewife to catch politicians and engineers unaware and garner public sympathy and publicity. The media promoted an image of the mother versus a military bureaucracy, elevating the campaign to national attention. Carr became more aggressive, and with the political climate surrounding the Vietnam War, problems in the Everglades and other ongoing protests, eventually stopped the building of the canal after over $70 million had been invested in its construction.

The above is only one example provided in this section of a powerful display of women carving out a space within the public sphere. This section highlights the progress of women through the century, as opportunities for education grows.

Part III: “Women Take the Lead”

This is the shortest section of the two.The first chapter addresses the inequalities faced by African Americans and the local Indian population. The aboriginal Floridians vanished in the early eighteenth century as a result of imperialism. The tribes residing in Florida at the time were Seminole and Miccosukee Indians who migrated from Alabama and Georgia. Their populations within the state were small, however, as many of the Indians were relocated to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears. Those left lived in the surrounding areas of the Everglades. A few women rallied for support of the Indians; although, the support was often what was deemed appropriate from the white perspective, as the natives were never consulted. The lands they were granted were often not suitable for their lifestyle, or they were transplanted without consideration of their preferences. There were some women, such as Harriet Mary Bedell who directly interacted with the Miccosukee people to support them and preserve their culture, including a trip to Washington, D.C., “to prevent Japanese imitations from being sold in America.” Rightfully distrustful of the state government’s interests, the Miccosukee Indians hired legal help to fight the State of Florida on tightening pollution requirements.

Poole’s also discusses African Americans, and their propensity to live near hazardous waste (Florida Superfund) sites compared to whites. Her discussion on the issue and related transgressions are unsatisfying, however. Including the discussion in the next chapter on the Civil Rights movement, this issue isn’t addressed as thoroughly as in similar examples in Parts I and II. Nevertheless, she accurately captures the systematic pollution of African American communities with a couple of detailed examples.

Lastly, Poole talks about activists in the farmworker community. The farmworker community, she explains, is often forgotten by the public seeking local interests or overlooked in government policy. Poole paints this activist community as relatively young, citing work as recent as 2011.

Her last chapter, titled “Women Leaders,” takes another look at the progression of women in the public sphere from a broader perspective than that explored within the rest of the book. “We are the beneficiaries of [early female activists’] gritty determination,” Poole concludes. Saving Florida is certainly worth the read for understanding the efficacy of grassroots organizing and the role women played at shaping society in the 20th century. This report is certainly not exhaustive of the topics discussed.