The point, after all, is to change the world.
Released on October 1st, this is the inaugural issue of the relaunch of the Berkeley Journal of Sociology.
How do relationships between left-leaning political parties and social movements change over time? Rebecca Tarlau looks at the case of the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) and the Workers’ Party (PT), examining the complexity of state-society relations — asking whether social movements can be “prefigurative” while still contesting state power.
Few know more about democracy and governance in Iceland than Jón Ólafsson. Thomas Hintze interviews Ólafsson, asking if it is fair to characterize Iceland’s “cutlery revolution” of 2009 as prefigurative or leaderless.
The vast tailings of South Africa’s gold and copper mines have given rise to an informal scavenger economy. What many see as waste, the immigrant laborers of the mine dumps see as a vital source of income.
The South African government has delivered well over 3 million formal homes free of charge since the 1994 transition. But in post-apartheid Cape Town, many recipients of these houses are fed up. Rather than the endpoint of the post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery reproduces it anew, accentuating discontent in the process.
On Ari Shavit’s book My Promised Land, the phenomenon of Palestinian-blindness, and the legitimation of massacres.
What role can a graduate-run publication in sociology fill in the 21st century? Here’s our answer: Instead of publishing traditional research articles, we are writing the history of the present.