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Local Actions Melissa Checker

Local Actions By Melissa Checker

Local Actions by Melissa Checker


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Summary

Illustrates how ethnographic research itself can become a tool for activism. This book features ten studies that present activist groups across US - from transgender activists in New York City, to South Asian teenagers in Silicon Valley, to evangelical Christians and Palestinian Americans.

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Local Actions Summary

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America by Melissa Checker

Activism is alive and well in the United States, according to Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman. It exists on large and small scales and thrives in unexpected places. Finding activism in backyards, art classes, and urban areas branded as ghettos, these anthropologists explore the many routes people take to work toward social change. Ten absorbing studies present activist groups across the country-from transgender activists in New York City, to South Asian teenagers in Silicon Valley, to evangelical Christians and Palestinian Americans. Each one examines a social change effort as it unfolds on the ground. Through their anthropological approach these portraits of American society suggest the inherent possibilities in identity-based organizing and offer crucial in-depth perspectives on such hotly debated topics as multiculturalism and the culture wars, the environment, racism, public education, Native American rights, and the Christian right. Moving far beyond the walls of academia, the contributors address the complex issues that arise when researchers have stakes in the subjects they study. Scholars can play multiple roles in the activist struggles they recount, and these essays illustrate how ethnographic research itself can become a tool for activism.

Local Actions Reviews

Engagingly written, the volume will appeal across the readership spectrum, from general readers to professionals...Recommended. All levels and libraries. -- S. Cable Choice The volumes focus on activism and identity provides a compelling image of an activist strategy for advancing social research. -- Elisia L. Cohen Argumentation And Advocacy The strength Checker and Fishman's Local Actions is in its clearly written, accessible case studies of efforts at social change. -- Karen Brodkin Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power Local Actions is a welcome volume that represents a (still) rare instance of anthropologists engaging in the study of political processes in western society; it provides us with detail-rich and nuanced understandings of politics as it takes place in practice, and in everyday settings. -- Davide Pero Social Anthropology

About Melissa Checker

Melissa Checker is assistant professor of applied anthropology at the University of Memphis. Her research on environmental justice activism is the subject of an upcoming ethnography and several articles. She has been involved as an activist in the environmental justice movement. In her own discipline she endeavors to bring anthropological voices into public policy. Maggie Fishman is completing her doctoral dissertation on the contemporary arts education movement in New York City in the department of anthropology at New York University. She works evaluating arts-in-education programs in New York City public schools and has been active there in various causes, including the creation of a neighborhood school whose curriculum incorporates the tools of ethnography.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Faye Ginsburg Acknowledgments Introduction, by Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman Treading Murky Waters: Day-To-Day Dilemmas in the Construction of a Pluralistic U.S. Environmental Movement, by Melissa Checker Creating Art, Creating Citizens: Arts Education as Cultural Activism, by Maggie Fishman Creating a Political Space for American Indian Economic Development: Indian Gaming and American Indian Activism, by Kate Spilde The Calculus of Pain: Violence, Anthropological Ethics, and the Category Transgender, by David Valentine We Shall Overcome? Changing Politics and Changing Sexuality in the Ex-Gay Movement, by Tanya Erzen Sins of Our Soccer Moms: Servant Evangelism and the Spiritual Injuries of Class, by Omri Elisha Food Fights: Contesting Cultural Diversity in Crown Heights, by Henry Goldschmidt FOBby or Tight? Multicultural Day and Other Struggles in Two Silicon Valley High Schools, by Shalini Shankar Gathering Roots and Making History in the Korean Adoptee Community, by Eleana Kim Activism and Exile: Palestinianness and the Politics of Solidarity, by Rabab Abdulhadi

Additional information

CIN0231128517G
9780231128513
0231128517
Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America by Melissa Checker
Used - Good
Paperback
Columbia University Press
20040225
280
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

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