movements Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

September 21, 2022 • by Terri Gordon-Zolov, Eric Zolov and Jordi Mariné Jubany

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

Activism

The Walls of Santiago

How the Joker and Pikachu become symbols of the Chilean social uprising, in an excerpt from Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov’s new book

September 21, 2022 • by Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov

Humor provided a powerful weapon in the ﬁght to topple the civic-military dictatorship. The radical deprivation of human rights during the Pinochet regime had secondary costs, among which were the loss of a sense of freedom, spontaneity, and overall well-being. ...

Politics

Movements and Parties or Movement Parties?

Our contemporary conundrum

March 30, 2022 • by Sidney Tarrow

But how deeply have these recent developments disrupted the forms of the two main political parties? Are we still dealing—as the title of my book implies—with “movements and parties?” Or with movement-parties, hybrids that have added the passions of movements to the parties, while depriving the parties of one of ...

Movements and Parties or Movement Parties?

Politics

How Movements on the Right and Left Differ—and Why That Difference Matters

Defiant oppositional disorder threatens Republicans and the future of democracy in America

March 30, 2022 • by Michael Tomasky

I believe that one can’t understand American politics today, and one certainly can’t properly understand the rise of Donald Trump, without keeping this aspiration/opposition distinction at the center of our analysis. Because just as the movements of Left and Right are different in this key respect, these differences inform and ...

How Movements on the Right and Left Differ—and Why That Difference Matters

Politics

Social Movements and Political Parties in the Making and Unmaking of Modern American Democracy

Taking a long view of a contentious history

March 28, 2022 • by Sidney Tarrow

Where can the American left go from here? How should the Democratic party respond to the continuing electoral potency of the illiberal currents that now dominate the Republican party? And how should movement activists respond?...