Tag Archives: Social movement

Features, How Capitalists Think, Uncategorized

David Loher: Complicity or pragmatism? A labor movement and its fight against the asbestos industry

This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne).

This contribution focuses on the decades-long struggle of workers and citizens in an industrial town in Northern Italy against the hazardous asbestos cement industry. It analyses the dividing lines that emerged in these social struggles at two particular moments. First, it examines the trade unions’ struggles for improved safety measures and the subsequent demand to shut down the entire asbestos cement factory because of the environmental risk it represented for the whole region. Second, it analyses the legal struggle that followed, when the social movement brought the claim for justice to the courts, demanding punishment for the former main investors.

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Features, The Latin American Pink Tide

Thomas Grisaffi: After the Referendum: Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism

This post is part of a series on the Latin American pink tide, moderated and edited by Massimiliano Mollona (Goldsmiths, University of London).

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In February 2016 Bolivian President Evo Morales, an indigenous Aymara and former coca grower, lost his bid to amend the Constitution to allow him to stand for a third consecutive term. This was a blow to Morales, who has won re-election twice (in 2009 and 2014), and has triumphed in two previous referendums. Commentators saw the defeat as evidence that the pink tide in Bolivia is receding. But such evaluations are premature; 49 percent of the population still voted in favor of the amendment, and while members of the “no” camp might want to see change at the top, they don’t necessarily want a return to neoliberal orthodoxy. The Morales administration has experienced its fair share of corruption, conflict, division, and poor planning, but on balance most Bolivians have done better under a left-leaning government.

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Blog

Ruy Llera Blanes: Revolutionary states in Luanda: “Events” and political strife in Angola

Last 11 November, Angola celebrated forty years of independence—a memorable date. However, these celebrations have been overshadowed by a movement of contestation that has turned a spotlight on the local regime’s antidemocratic governing tactics. This text explores some intricacies of this process, using an “anthropology of events” as a device to account for the increasingly tense political environment in this country.
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Conversations on the Left

David Bozzini: Gabriella Coleman on the ethnography of digital politics – part 2

David Bozzini is a research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is researching on Eritrean deserters movements and on the resistance to digital surveillance. He co-edits Tsantsa, the journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She wrote about the free software movement in her book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetic of Hacking. After years of researching Anonymous and following its online discussions and debates, she published Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014).

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Conversations on the Left

David Bozzini: Gabriella Coleman on the ethnography of digital politics – part 1

David Bozzini is a research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is researching on Eritrean deserters movements and on the resistance to digital surveillance. He co-edits Tsantsa, the journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She wrote about the free software movement in her book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetic of Hacking. After years of researching Anonymous and following its online discussions and debates, she published Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014).

Continue reading →