Creating Co-Curricular Activist Writing Projects for Students in Writing Programs: The Case of the Neurodiversity Celebration Collaborative (NCC)

Context The NCC originally came into being through calls from various corners for more attention to the unmet mental health needs of college students and students with autism (Beiter et al.;Bruffaerts et al.;Lipson et al.;PinderAmake;Storrie et al.) as well as calls from disability activists for more space to support, highlight, and celebrate disabled and neurodiverse persons and the rich diversity they bring to our campuses (Dwyer et al.;Clouder et al.;Sachs;Yergeau). Through strategic research and advocacy, we will evaluate current mental health resources on and off campus, create appreciation versus sympathy for cognitive differences, bring to light inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the literature, establish appropriate forums of disclosure for students, and ultimately help constitute a more connected and understanding campus climate that celebrates neurodiversity as an integral part of any functioning university and its surrounding community. [...]most recently during the 2021-2022 academic year, the group held an event in which they discussed the concept of neurodiversity itself with a wider audience. Establishing student leaders is a crucial step in moving the faculty member out of the leadership role and making it clear to students that they have agency and the final say in how things will go.

‘The slow pandemic': youth's climate activism and the stakes for youth movements under Covid-19

Pandemic conditions have affected social movement activity in various ways. In this article, we explore how young Cypriot climate activists, associated with the global Fridays for Future movement, attempt to integrate pandemic conditions in their mobilizing tactics, as well as how such conditions affect their collective youth agency. We first look into the strategic antagonistic framings they develop to counter dominant discourses of the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis and explore how these are informed by their understandings of, and emotions on, climate change as an effect of capitalism and overconsumption and as a type of ‘slow pandemic'. We argue that by extending climate change crisis discourse to encompass the cause of the pandemic, young activists assert temporality as continuity, rather than rupture, and challenge the distinction between the exceptional and the everyday on which Emergency governance is based on. By doing this, they unsettle adult hegemonic discourses on temporality, emergency and crisis that lead to an uneven world. Secondly, we reflect on the impact of Covid-19 on non-institutional youth activism by exploring the challenges these activists face to their sustenance and reproduction, given that access to public space, as we claim, is crucial for teenagers in developing the necessary relationality that is key for the maintenance of their social movement activity. We argue that youth movements emerge and operate within particular conditions which are currently under threat given the distinct mechanisms of governing populations engineered during Covid-19.

The Why and Whither of Asian American Studies: Toward a Reckoning

Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014) On March 11, 2020, roughly three months after the first death attributed to the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus was confirmed in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization elevated its characterization of the ensuing outbreaks from "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC) to global pandemic. [...]we editors, along with the contributors to this special issue, acknowledge from the outset that the formation of Asian American studies—along with ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies—was first and foremost a paradigmatic endeavor, one that, as Lisa Lowe productively characterizes it, remains "key to thinking in comparative relational ways about race, power, and interconnected colonialisms. More than a few students found themselves spending more time in the community than in school. [...]were born a host of Asian American community organizations and services, as well as an increasing vector of Asian American political activism in defense of our communities. "4 Such reckonings, intimately tied to the formation of Asian American studies as a critical race-based interdiscipline born out of 1960s civil rights movements and liberation fronts, encapsulate the field's aspirational politics.

Our Children Will Fight for the Climate: How Congo-Basin Writers Prophesied Global Youth Climate Activism 1

According to Riikka Paloniemi and Annukka Vainio (2011), as early as 1992, the United Nations in its international programme dubbed Agenda 21 asserted that young people, who constitute about 30 percent of the world's population, are important stakeholders in achieving sustainable development (398-399). Much momentum has accumulated in the direction of youth activism for the climate and environment. Besides garnering much recognition from the international community as important actors in climate change policy and action, youth-led climate commitment has continued to grow in leaps and bounds. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, this movement mobilized millions of school-going children/youths across many cities throughout the world to skip classes on Fridays and protest, asking their governments and corporate bodies to concretely address the global climate and environmental crises and save their future.2 Greta Thunberg has spoken to world leaders on the need to curb carbon emissions and has addressed the issue of climate change at many high-level gatherings, including COP24, which was held from in December 2018 in Katowice, Poland;the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019 and 2020;the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Commission in February 2019;an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican in April 2019;and the UK Parliament in Westminster, also in April 2019. [...]the School Strikes for Climate movement has not only caused the resignation of Belgian Environment Minister Joke Schauvliege (who had falsely claimed that children's climate protests were 'set-up') but has also been positively received by key global figures such as UN Secretary General António Guterres, who, following an unprecedented turnout of approximately 1.4 million young protesters in over 120 countries on 15th March 2019, remarked that "the climate strikers should inspire us all to act at the next UN summit".3 Moreover, on 12th April 2019, having witnessed the massive turnout of young protesters the month before, twenty-two renowned scientists across the globe published a letter in the journal Science acknowledging that "the concerns of young protesters are justified" and pledging their support for the youth strikes for climate (Hagedorn et al. 2019, 139-140).

Thinking Resistance, "Emergency,” and Kismet: A Response to Dylan Rodríguez's Presidential Address

The battles over masking only amplified preexisting culture and race wars in which entrenched libertarianism and neoliberal individualism evaded the economic and existential precarity caused by degraded social welfare and state health care. Counterterrorism projects such as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) introduced by Barack Obama have relied on recruitment of community members, social service providers, and educators for self-surveillance and self-regulation of political expression and community organizing: a liberal counterterrorism approach for "reformist reform.” 5 Nabeel Abraham and Will Youmans provide important analyses of the "Containment System” in response to the War on Terror, based on "entrepreneurial opportunism” (Rodríguez) by Arab and Muslim American educators, professionals, and community leaders (including in the nonprofit industrial complex), some of whom collaborated with federal and state agencies.6 Academic Containment Reckoning with these critiques from critical Arab American or Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) studies requires grappling with the long history of anti-Arab/Muslim state policies of surveillance, policing, and mass incarceration that preceded 2001. The Zionist lobby and anti-Palestinian organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have increasingly deployed the language of tolerance and civility to tar critics of Israel with charges of anti-Semitism.7 These liberal strategies, illustrating Rodríguez's argument, can be more damaging than frontal attacks on the Palestine justice movement because the language of racism is harder to challenge

Irreparable Damage: International Housing Rights and Local Housing Struggles in Rome after 2020

The recent interventions of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) to suspend evictions of tenants in Rome, Italy, allows us to shed light into the forthcoming social catastrophe caused by Italian housing policies, and into the new advancements of social movements for housing. As two scholar-activists involved both in research on housing and in political actions to prevent evictions, we describe how housing movements in Rome are facing the contradictions between local and international discourses on the right to housing.

Queering Diasporic Desi Solidarity: South Asian Activism in US and UK Multiracial Social Movements

This article explores the linkages between queerness, racialization, activism, and community care in the South Asian diaspora. It examines activism, organizing, and social movement work practiced by queer diasporic South Asians in the UK and the United States. By analyzing the South Asian activist relationship to, and solidarity and partnership with, Black liberation activism, this article conceptualizes a framing of queer South Asian diasporic solidarity. This solidarity is framed through contrasting articulations of joint struggle, allyship, and kinship in queer communities. To articulate this struggle, the article contrasts histories of South Asian racialization, politicization, and queerness in the UK and the United States, and synthesizes first-person activist accounts of modern-day queer South Asian activists in the diaspora. Finally, it argues that queer feminist South Asian activists in both countries are employing a model of queered solidarity with Black activists and Black liberation, though in differing forms in each country, that centers queer intimacies and anti-patriarchal modes of organizing for liberation across queer communities of color.

Critical Orthodoxies and (Re) Imagining Scholarship for a Brave New World

Introduction to the special issue.

Dance and Activism: A Century of Radical Dance Across the World by Dana Mills (review)

According to Mills, there are very few books on "conceptual or theoretical studies of dance and activism” (3), but most importantly, any that do exist were written before the major events and upheavals of the current moment. Mills presents it as a practical problem that helps us to understand, among other things, why so many governments worldwide have shifted toward authoritarianism in recent decades. Because the author's main argument is that dance itself is an activist practice, Mills clarifies that the underlying problematic of the book is "how do people work to overcome dislocation from themselves, their societies, and their work by telling their life stories through dance?” (9). [...]the book could be used in full as a required reading for courses centered on dance as activism or dance for social change.

IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF FEDERAL CLAIMS

Democracy Worldwide v. United States No. 20-782C Filed: September 30, 2020· OPINION BLAKE, J. This case arises out of a grant awarded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to Democracy Worldwide (DW), as authorized by the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020, Pub. USAID sought applications for programs to increase protection for human rights defenders through various methods, including, but not limited to, strengthening civil society capacity to conduct civic education and activism, bolstering protections for journalists and human rights advocates, and conducting strategic civil and human rights-based litigation. [...]DW's Program Manager, Amanda McDowell, contacted Justin Baird, the Agreements Officer Representative (AOR) at USAID, to alert him that the training would need to make certain adjustments. The cheapest option per mask was a manufacturer that required a 500-mask minimum. Because the COVID-19 pandemic appeared that it would last beyond the first training, DW decided to order 500 masks.

Peddling the Revolution?

[...]as there is no need to rent shop space and the seller purchases products only after an order has been paid, it is a business that requires no advanced capital and thus is easily accessible to young and poor people. [...]it involves an almost exclusively one-way flow of Taiwan-made commodities to Hong Kong and a flow of cash in the opposite direction. Taiwanese snacks, fruit, and creative cultural products are also increasingly popular in the city, partly for political reasons. Since the 2014 Umbrella Movement, Taiwan's government and civil society organisations have stood behind Hongkongers' struggle for democracy, incurring criticism from the Chinese authorities. According to the explanation provided on RS International's website, the initials ‘RS' refer to ‘Radical Solider' and ‘Rebuild System', indicating their radical motivations.

The Frontlines and Margins: Gendered Care and Covid‐19 in the Indian Media

Among the many stories that emerged out of India during the pandemic, one was somewhat buried under the media discourse around the migrant crisis, lockdown regulations, and economic fallout. This was the story of striking accredited social health activist workers asking for fair wages, improved benefits, and better working conditions. The Covid‐19 crisis highlighted the poor health infrastructure and the precarious, and often, stigmatized nature of frontline work, managed at the community level by paramedical workers, a significant proportion of whom are women. There has been considerable attention paid by feminist groups as well as health‐related civil society organizations on the gender‐based inequities that have emerged during the pandemic, particularly in relation to care work. This study explores how care work performed by the accredited social health activists was framed in the mainstream media, through an examination of articles in three selected English daily newspapers over one year of the pandemic. Drawing on theoretical work deriving from similar health crises in other regions of the world, we explore how the public health infrastructure depends on the invisible care‐giving labor of women in official and unofficial capacities to respond to the situation. The systemic reliance on women's unpaid or ill‐paid labor at the grassroots level is belied by the fact that women's concerns and contributions are rarely visible in issues of policy and public administration. Our study found that this invisibility extended to media coverage as well. Our analysis offers a "political economy of caregiving” that reiterates the need for women's work to be recognized at all levels of functioning. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal).

Climate change and the challenge to liberalism

In this editorial, we consider the ways in which liberal constitutionalism is challenged by and presents challenges to the climate crisis facing the world. Over recent decades, efforts to mitigate the climate crisis have generated a new set of norms for states and non-state actors, including regulatory norms (emission standards, carbon regulations), organising principles (common but differentiated responsibility) and fundamental norms (climate justice, intergenerational rights, human rights). However, like all norms, these remain contested. Particularly in light of their global reach, their specific behavioural implications and interpretations and the related obligations to act remain debatable and the overwhelming institutionalization of the neoliberal market economy makes clear and effective responses to climate change virtually impossible within liberal societies.

From Petitions to Demands, Restitution to Representation

When HIV antiretroviral therapy centers were converted into COVID-19 wards, the same activists who had organized a women-, queer-, and trans-led protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act wrote letters to health authorities. In Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India, edited by Chatterji, Angana P., Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Jaffrelot, Christophe, 375-96. On February 1, 2020, a group of queer activists paid a visit to Mumbai Bagh, a sit-in protest by Muslim women against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act inspired by the landmark Shaheen Bagh sit-in that began in Delhi in December 2019. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of History of the Present is the property of Duke University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

HOW YOUNG ACTIVISTS RESPONDED TO THE FIRST WAVE OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS IN ITALY: VARIATIONS ACROSS TRAJECTORIES OF PARTICIPATION

This study explores how young activists in Italy responded to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic using sixteen longitudinal qualitative interviews conducted in 2018 and 2020. Our fieldwork suggests that the Covid-19 crisis did not resonate with any significant shift in the trajectory of participation. At the same time, three major empirical observations with regard to time reappropriation, care practices, and digital activism were made, all of which worked in different ways according to the interviewees' trajectories of participation. This research extends beyond the Covid-19 crisis and contributes to the literature on political participation by providing a way of investigating how activists respond to critical events in different ways depending on their trajectories of participation.

To Build for the Future

Rejecting the well-worn narratives of pity, scorn, othering, and medicalization that exist primarily for the benefit of the nondisabled, disabled people insist on better and richer stories about disability as a way of being and a way of knowing. Social scientists have explored the larger growth of systemic ableism and its specific manifestations in employment, health, housing, education, and beyond. [...]social media has become a particularly vibrant place for organizing, resource-sharing, community-building, laughing, loving, mourning, and world-building. In the COVID era, these virtual spaces have taken on a new level of importance in facilitating survival, resistance, and joy. [...]that requires a dual focus: we have to face the violence of ableism, especially as it continues to reverberate throughout the lives of disabled people, and we also have to celebrate the ways that disabled people resist, reclaim, and recreate in spite of it.

Expanding Roles of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in the 2019 Hepatitis E Outbreak in a Peri-urban Slum, Nagpur, India.

OBJECTIVE: Due to constraints in the dedicated health work force, outbreaks in peri-urban slums are often reported late. This study explores the feasibility of deploying Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in outbreak investigation and understand the extent to which this activity gives a balanced platform to fulfil their roles during public health emergencies to reduce its impact and improve mitigation measures. METHODS: Activities of ASHAs involved in the hepatitis E outbreak were reviewed from various registers maintained at the subcenter. Also, various challenges perceived by ASHAs were explored through focus group discussion (FGD). During March to May 2019, 13 ASHAs involved in the hepatitis outbreak investigation and control efforts in a peri-urban slum of Nagpur with population of around 9000. In total, 192 suspected hepatitis E cases reported. RESULTS: During the outbreak, ASHAs performed multiple roles comprising house-to-house search of suspected cases, escorting suspects to confirm diagnosis and referral, community mobilization for out-reach investigation camps, risk communication to vulnerable, etc. During the activity, ASHAs faced challenges such as constraints in the logistics, compromise in other health-related activities, and challenges in sustaining behavior of the community. CONCLUSIONS: It is feasible to implement the investigation of outbreaks through ASHAs. Despite challenges, they are willing to participate in these activities as it gave them an opportunity to fulfil the role as an activist, link worker, as well as a community interface.

Malaysia 2021: A widening political legitimacy crisis

In 2021, Malaysia saw the deepening of a political legitimacy deficit as demands for reforms and political change remained largely unattended. The first half of the year was marked by a state of emergency, declared by the government in the face of a new wave of COVID-19 infections. Amid the persisting health crisis and its adverse socio-economic effects, mounting public frustration found expression in online and offline collective mobilizations. Meanwhile, power struggles within the ruling coalition led to a fresh change of government. Then, in December, unprecedented floods ravaged the country's most industrialized region. In that context, a new wave of public outrage rose against the government's sluggish response to the disaster. As the country's economic downturn continued to disproportionally affect the most vulnerable social groups, and the political elites appeared incapable of addressing pressing policy issues, Malaysia witnessed the growth of youth-led activism with an appetite for political change.

Rediscovering the Trans-national Migration of Truck Drivers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This research aims to understand the daily life of professional truck drivers on the East-West European route, including the harsh situations derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, I will conduct specific case studies, participant observation on-site and on social media, and semi-structured interviews with Romanian truck drivers. Social media represents a principal field of the present research as, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, they functioned as recruiting platforms while also providing specific psychological support through Facebook groups' members. I will analyse public Facebook groups consisting of Romanian immigrants in Germany and groups of truck drivers: Soferi de tir pe comunitate, Comunitatea română din Germania, Romani in Baden Württemberg, Romani in Stuttgart, Dreptul muncii în Germania de la A la Z. Concepts of biopower and biopolitics represented on the course of the SARS-CoV-2 the starting point for a series of discriminatory attitudes towards people working or travelling to other European states. Thus, analyzing official Romanian authorities' Facebook pages and online press trusts (Digi24, HotNews, Antena3, Deutsche Welle, Bild, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit), we observe that truck drivers represent a category highly affected by the medical emergency and how it has been approached both in the home and the target country. Truck drivers became civic activists, a voice of people who are poorly treated at their workplace, manifesting themselves most notably in the online environment. However, they also took action physically by organizing protest movements and violating the law through not obeying pandemic-related measures imposed by the biopower represented by the national authorities.

Counter Streams: Organizing the Dakar 2022 Alternative World Water Forum

On the one hand, the most violent expressions of global capitalism can be seen in the acts of depriving the most marginalized populations of water, whether through corporate control or structural reforms imposed by international financial institutions on debt-ridden governments. [...]despite claims that the WWF is open to all, its registration fee of 450 euros is unaffordable to most ordinary citizens, especially those most adversely impacted by water shortages, pollution, and lack of access. The Blue Planet Project, Public Services International, Africans Rising, Engineering Without Borders Spain, African Ecofeminist Collective, African Water Commons Collective, Ecumenical Water Justice Network of the World Council of Churches, Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, Platform for Community Partnerships of the Americas (PAPC), the Interamerican Water Justice Network (REDVIDA), and the European Water Movement. [...]we organized multiple decentralised meetings, webinars on regional water struggles and solidarities connecting communities of struggle and issues including feminist political economy and ecology, water privatization, water financialisation (water went onto the stock market in California in 2021), and water-related impacts of Covid. While there have been waves of regional water mobilization (and demobilization) across the continent, there was no readymade African coalition working on water justice issues when the World Water Council announced its 9th Forum in Dakar.