Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged activism

Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

Difficulties concentrating in school, shame, depression, guilt, fear, low self-esteem, poor body image, and powerlessness are just some of the repercussions that victims of sexual harassment at school experience, according to research conducted by Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). This Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization works to “improve gender and race relations and socioeconomic conditions for [the] most vulnerable youth and communities of color.” Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Megan Huppuch of GGE have collaboratively written Hey, Shorty!, which tells GGE’s story, while providing a model for teens to teach their peers what constitutes sexual harassment and how to prevent it. The book also gives activists, educators, parents and students a hands-on guide to combat sexual harassment and violence in their schools and neighborhoods.

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives

As a feminist concerned with social justice, in the past year or so I’ve become convinced that dismantling the prison-industrial complex should be a top priority amongst feminists.

The Latte Rebellion

Asha Jamison’s classmates are quick to categorize her. She is called both a “towelhead” and “barely Asian.” Asha and her best friend Carey have a harder time describing their own ethnicities. Asha is part Indian, part Mexican, and part Irish, while Carey is half Chinese and half Caucasian. When they begin describing themselves as lattes—a mix of coffee and milk—they start brainstorming ways to distribute their idea to other multiethnic teens and coffee lovers.

The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 8.3 (Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert)

In hindsight, I probably should have waited to read all of the articles in this issue of Barnard Center for Research on Women’s The Scholar and Feminist Online journal, “Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert,” before emailing out sections that resonated with me and the work I’m interested in doing.

Revolutionary Women: A Book of Stencils

I'm all for learning more—and for disseminating information to a wide audience—about women who have played significant roles in history. All too often, women who have contributed to movements for change have been given all too little (or no) attention or credit. I agree that we need to have a more complete picture of the female revolutionaries who risked and sometimes gave their lives for a cause.

Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work

“Actively listen... You cannot help if you do not hear... Actively listen...” These words swirl across the cover of Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work. The book is a collection of eleven articles by white anti-racist activists reflecting on their experiences with accountability.

Transnational Social Work Practice

Transnational Social Work Practice is definitely not a book intended for a popular audience. That it is a textbook was clear to me before I even laid eyes on the book, when I noted that the list price on Amazon.com—for this slim 241-page volume—was $50.

Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

You may already know (and I hope you do) that zoos and circuses aren't good places for animals. But how do we know? Jason Hribal's Fear of an Animal Planet argues that we only need listen to what the animals themselves are telling us. He fills the pages with story after story of animals who "misbehave": who escape, who refuse to perform and reproduce, who attack (and often kill) human handlers.

The Young Lords: A Reader

Before reading The Young Lords: A Reader, I had never heard of the Young Lords Party. The original Young Lords were a loosely organized group that emerged from a street gang fighting the gentrification of Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Chicago.

Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas

Of the many things I accomplished in high school, “leading a political uprising” was suspiciously absent. Yet around the world, teenage girls are organizing their own social revolutions, a trend largely undocumented and unanalyzed before Jessica Taft’s Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas.

A Guide to Picking Locks, Number Two

Full disclosure here: I have never, ever picked a lock. I suppose it would be kind of neat to know how to bust into a door with a wafer tumbler lock, but I just never have really experienced the need. An excellent parlor trick, perhaps? A desire to emulate Houdini in a daring escape from the chains of certain death?

An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country

Twenty-seven years ago, activists Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were caught transporting explosives to a New Jersey storage facility. Although the pair had no immediate plans to use the incendiary materials, they—and their comrades in the May 19 Communist Party—were stockpiling them for a revolution they believed was imminent. Rosenberg’s searing memoir, An American Radical—a chronicle of sixteen years spent in four U.S.

Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas

I was initially unimpressed by Firebrands, but that was because I approached it wrong. I tried to sit down in my living room and read it cover-to-cover, and that's not what this book is for.

My Sisters Made of Light

When I attended the book signing for Jacqueline St. Joan’s novel My Sisters Made of Light, I knew nothing about the book aside from its inspiration: a chance encounter between St. Joan, an American domestic violence activist, and Aisha, a Pakistani activist. St. Joan was moved by a shared sense of purpose to write Aisha’s story—the story of a teacher who has orchestrated secret efforts to rescue women condemned to death for so-called honor crimes in Pakistan for the past twenty-five years.

Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists

Got kids? Do they have time and energy? Do they care about something? Anything? Then get them Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists. Buy it, give it to them, sit back, and feel good about having made a difference in the world. Or at least planting the seed. Do Something! is a very smart book.

Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship

One of the aims of the groundbreaking work Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean is the diffusion of the ideas of these mostly Latin-American scholars to a larger audience, thus the original 2006 Spanish-language volume’s translation and subsequent adaptation and expansion into English. However, it seems contradictory to the spirit of the project to start reviewing it without mentioning the authors here.

If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk: Fifteen Years Of Plan-It X Records

If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk is a sweet, well put together documentary film that captures the spirit and feel of the do-it-yourself, underground punk scene that has grown up around Plan-it X Records in Bloomington, Indiana. The film began as part of a filmmaking workshop at Plan-it X’s weeklong festival in Bloomington in 2006.

Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent

My fascination with the anti-globalization movement, like my own baby steps into activism, is a late bloomer. I came of age when my peers were shutting down Seattle. I was reading Marx for the first time in college when IMF protestors took to the streets in DC. Yet throughout my extended adolescence, radical politics was background noise. I never paused to find out why globalization made people so angry. Like a lot of people growing up white and middle class, militancy was excessive and embarrassing.

Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change

At times, the mind can be one's own worst enemy. When our ego feels threatened, it is wired to convince us of almost anything. And when certain unpleasant emotions arise at passing a homeless man on the way to work or seeing African children on TV with flies on their faces, we are accustomed to look away. How do certain people and organizations persuade us and our ego to donate time and money to their cause, while others don't seem to reach us enough?

Raging Grannies: The Action League

If you’ve been to a demonstration during the last two decades you’ve likely seen them: Bold, sassy, elders calling themselves The Raging Grannies. Mixing street theatre with costuming, their zany hats, political buttons, and boisterous, if often off-key, singing sets them apart from other protesters. They’re fun—and they defy stereotypes about what old women can and should be doing.

Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists

Though editor Courtney E. Martin’s new book means to school baby boomer types who mock the millennial generation for their perceived apathy, Do it Anyway: The New Generation of Activists is a balm for burned out justice advocates of any age.

Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks, and Food Activists

Seared Scallop Salad with Honey Vinaigrette and Moqui (Spicy) Mac (n’Cheese), yum. This was simply the one of the selections of delicious recipes in Growing Roots that I attempted with the assistance of my boyfriend/sous-chef. But Growing Roots is much more than a cookbook. Chronicling one woman’s cross-country road trip and profiling folks on the ground at every level, from composting queens to herbalists to family farmers to social entrepreneurs-restaurateurs, Growing Roots is a unique window into the breadth of labor and love that is going into the ever-growing movement of food sustainability.

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

Much has been written about the courage and tenacity of the male ministers, activists, and young turks of the Civil Rights movement: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, and others. About the role of women, we know less. Now, six women who were active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) have rectified this omission by compiling their own testimonies and those of their colleagues in Hands on the Freedom Plow. Each of the fifty-two narratives acknowledges the centrality of women’s experience in the struggle for human rights in the southern United States in the late twentieth century. Weighing in at almost 600 pages, these compelling, at times harrowing personal stories recast the history of the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of women who lived it day by day.

Patrick's Wish

Patrick's Wish is a true story told from the perspective of a young girl whose brother had a serious illness. It is evident from page one that there was some serious hero worship going on when it came to her older brother, Patrick. The book itself has an almost scrapbook feel to it, with alternating pages of text and photographs from Patrick and Lyanne’s childhood, and it details Lyanne’s eventual discovery that her brother’s illness is terminal.

Launch of StopWatch (10/18/2010)

Recent studies show that in England and Wales Black people are stopped and searched seven times more than Caucasians; and Asians at twice the Caucasian rate. Jesse Jackson has formed a new coalition of NGO’s and academic societies to combat racial profiling and power abuse in UK policing. The organization, StopWatch, was launched at King’s College in London with an address from Reverend Jesse Jackson followed by a panel discussion.

Women Count: A Guide to Changing the World

As a single mom with two jobs and an interest in finding space for volunteerism and activism, I immediately connected with Susan Bulkeley Butler’s interconnected main points—that the ways we “count” women don’t always count, and that women need to take control of the ways in which they “count” on personal and political levels.

Muzzling a Movement: The Effects of Anti-Terrorism Law, Money, and Politics on Animal Activism

There isn’t another contemporary nonviolent activist movement that is so routinely dismissed as too radical, mocked as too extreme, and so actively condemned and persecuted across the political spectrum as the animal rights movement. If you believe the media bias when reading reports about animal liberation, “victims” are often corporations and research facilities that abuse and slaughter animals, and the “terrorists” are those seeking a peaceful end to our destructive lifestyles and appetites.

Love, Race, and Liberation: ‘Til the White Day is Done

The subtitle of of JLove Calderón and Marcella Runell’s curriculum, Love, Race, and Liberation, comes from the poem “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes. To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Love, Race, and Liberation is a multimedia project

The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation

As a survivor of government sanctioned torture in Colombia, Hector Aristizabal was left with unsettled anger and fear. His wariness towards both his country and his future there worsens when one of his brothers is murdered by paramilitary soldiers. Aristizabal is eventually able to cast aside his bitterness, and find ways to aid others in their struggles by holding workshops for prisoners and victims of violence in the United States.

Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart

How could the title of this book not hook you? Power. Women. Heart. So, maybe I was biased from the beginning. Honestly, I was hoping that the book would be “all that.” It was. By page fifteen, not having gotten past the editor’s introduction, I was pulsing with energy. I was ready to get my lazy butt up off the couch and pitch in.
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