Activism Archives - Page 12 of 14

Activism

Photo Essay: The Side Streets

A walk through Manhattan in June, 2020

June 4, 2020 • by Janet Roitman

Fifth Avenue, June 3, 2020, 3:45 p.m. Shuttered. Sixth Avenue, June 3, 2020. Empty. Sixth Avenue, June 2, 2020, 6:20 p.m. Bare, boarded. June 2, 2020, 6:20 p.m. Side streets. June 2, 2020 6 p.m. Sheltering-in-place. Sixth Avenue, June 2, 6: 25 p.m. Bankrupt. June 3, 2020, 4:50 p.m. A shadow of myself. Janet Roitman is a professor ...

Activism

Wired Politics

Social media is crucial to organizing modern protests: It is also a vulnerability

June 4, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Nowadays, I try not to watch the cable news shows. There are other ways to get information about the demonstrations engulfing the United States, and my neighborhood in Manhattan, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. I text friends in the community for updates ...

Activism

What Is to Be Done?

Three scholars of democracy respond to the protests

June 4, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia

I believe this extraordinary nationwide mobilization is the best answer possible to the Democrats who engineered the destruction of the Sanders primary campaign -- I mean Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, James Carville, James Clyburn, Pete Buttigieg, and the innumerable reporters and media “experts” who from the beginning insisted ...

Activism

The Anti-Racist Uprising in Brooklyn

A report from the streets

June 3, 2020 • by Natasha Lennard

Since March, sirens have become a consistent soundtrack where I live in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. For weeks, this was the sound of ambulances, ushering thousands to nearby hospitals from the predominantly African American area, hard hit by the pandemic. But in recent days, the sirens have carried a different meaning. Night ...

Activism

In the Face of Terror

A statement in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd

June 1, 2020 • by Dwight A. McBride

I, like so many others, am both hurt and angered by the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. And as a Black American, this is also deeply personal for me. To be shown repeatedly that we have no guarantee of safety even in the course of ...

Activism

The Whole World is Watching

The American Left at a crossroads, redux

May 31, 2020 • by James Miller

I am a spectator to the fire this time. A resident of Manhattan, locked down during our pandemic, sheltering in place as an older person with a pre-existing condition, I now watch the world, not from my perch near Union Square, but from a bungalow in Connecticut, far removed from ...

Activism

How Do You Protest in a Pandemic?

The challenges of creating a social movement while social distancing

May 12, 2020 • by Jane Desmond

On Thursday, April 15, the traditional day for paying federal taxes, several thousand cars rolled to a stop on the streets in Lansing, Michigan. They surrounded the State Capitol, commencing “Operation Gridlock” to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s extension of the state’s “stay-at-home” order. Blaring horns, waving flags, and sprouting signs ...

Activism

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

It was a story told in photographs, but what we saw wasn’t what happened. It was worse.

May 4, 2020 • by Carol Wilder

The author would like to extend deep thanks to Thomas Grace, Alan Canfora, and Dean Kahler; and to NYU history Professor Robert Cohen for his clarifying remarks. Fifty years is a big part of a human life. How unsettling that the meticulously planned 50th commemoration of the tragic May 4th, 1970 killings at ...

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

Activism

Hong Kong Under Lockdown

From the masks of protesters to the mask of public health

April 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

The mask ban, based on a century-old colonial emergency ordinance, was largely upheld earlier this month in a controversial ruling by Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. By then, the Covid-19 crisis had stopped the mass protests, accomplishing what Carrie Lam and her officers could not during much of 2019. ...

Activism

Don’t Give Paranoids Too Much Credit

Some minds can’t trust anything or anyone not on their side

April 17, 2020 • by John Stoehr

The evidence? Here’s the Washington Post, explaining the Michigan rules. “Confused shoppers found they could buy liquor and lottery tickets … but couldn’t visit the vegetable seed aisle … The order required large stores to shut down plant nurseries and rope off sections where carpet, flooring, and paint were sold, provisions ...

Activism

Life and Protest in Hong Kong Amid COVID-19

An Interview with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Author of Vigil: Hong Kong On The Brink

March 17, 2020 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Mark Frazier

Mark W. Frazier [MF]: Your book was released on February 11, in the midst of a public health crisis in mainland China that has meant massive disruptions to life and work in Hong Kong, the cancellation of a major international arts festival, and the cessation (for now at least) of ...

Life and Protest in Hong Kong Amid COVID-19

Activism

From Mad Cows to Coronavirus

When Government Fails, Grassroots Activism Flourishes

March 17, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

This was bad enough; but in March 1996, Britain’s secretary of state for health announced ten cases of something similar in another species: a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) had been diagnosed in human patients. CJD is a fatal disease caused by a rampant protein that eats away the brain cells ...