(Following on Chris's argument in "The End Of Bubba Dominance", if a religiously and racially diverse coalition is the future of American politics, will we actually be able to govern effectivel? Community organizing and national electoral politics are not the same thing, but neither are they totally unrelated. Hence, there's a lot of food for thought in this diary, even if community organizing isn't your primary focus. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
We would all like to be able to just sit down with diverse collections of citizens from all walks of life and work together to solve the problems we face. My last post , however, discussed research showing that diverse contexts are unlikely to generate robust, free, and equal democratic dialogue.
I also asserted that it is really difficult to train people to stop dominating each other. But I didn't really provide any evidence, and commenters were rightly skeptical.
This post looks at a book by Eric H. F. Law that gives a good description of the ways people from some groups unintentionally end up dominating in small groups while others are silenced. Law's book shows how subtle the dynamics of domination can be.
(More! More! More! The Never-Ending Series continues... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
It's not unusual for idealistic college students to graduate from college envisioning a life working for social change. But, as Dana Fisher notes in Activism, Inc., paid opportunities for this kind of work, even low-paying ones, are few and far between. Here, I examine the tensions and often destructive issues involved in privileged students' desire for fulfilling, socially engaged, jobs, and in well-meaning efforts to respond to these desires.
(I Don't care if it's not apathy. It's a BIG problem. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
With the incredible problems facing poor people in the United States, it is easy to look out on the lack of resistance, the silence in the streets, and assume the problem is apathy. "These people just don't care."
Here, I argue that "apathy" is not a useful way to understand why collective action is so lacking.
(Another instalment in this excellent series that's garnering more and more attention as time goes on. Don't be left out... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
People from different cultures have different ways of organizing themselves for collective action. Here, I talk about differences between people from working-class and middle-class professional backgrounds.
It's important to stress that I am not talking about individuals, but instead cultural patterns that play out (or don't) uniquely in different contexts. These patterns can illuminate why groups act the way they do, but they can't predict how any individual will act, and don't capture everything (and sometimes don't say much at all) about a particular group. In this post I am talking about approaches to social action fairly broadly, and not simply within the tradition of Alinsky-based organizing.
STATE BLOGS
