129 books match the query 'Civics & Citizenship' and 8 start with p

cover of Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Coronavirus Crisis

Pandemic Solidarity

Mutual Aid during the Coronavirus Crisis

Marina Sitrin

Pluto Press, 2020

“Helps us to rethink and re-imagine an egalitarian society where no one is left behind”—London School of Economics Review of Books

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare, people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of COVID-19.

The world's media was quick to weave a narrative of selfish individualism, full of empty supermarket shelves and con-men. However, if you scratch the surface, you find a different story of community and self-sacrifice.
 
Looking at thirteen countries and regions, including India, Rojava, China and the US, the personal accounts in the book weave together to create a larger picture, revealing a universality of experience - a housewife in Istanbul supports her neighbor in the same way as a punk in Portland, and a grandmother in Italy does. Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and relationships we already have to create that society, challenging institutions of power that have already shown their fragility. Chapters include:
 
*Capitalism Kills, Solidarity Gives Life": A Glimpse of Solidarity Networks from Turkey
*Solidarity Network in Iraq During Covid-19: This Time the Enemy is Invisible
*Sharing Spaces and Crossing Borders: Voices from Taiwan
*Rethinking Minority and Mainstream in India
*Confronting State Authoritarianism: Civil Society and Community-Based Solidarity in Southern Africa
*On Intersectional Solidarity in Portugal
*Solidarity Networks in Greece
*Argentina: Injustices Magnified; Memories of Resistance Reactivated
*On Grassroots Organizing: Excerpts from Brazil

What happens to society when we are not held back by the neoliberal narrative? What can we do, to protect ourselves and one another, when we organize and act collectively? From the stories told here, maybe more than we expect.                   

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cover of Patriotic Education in a Global Age

Patriotic Education in a Global Age

Randall Curren and Charles Dorn

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Should schools attempt to cultivate patriotism? If so, why? And what conception of patriotism should drive those efforts? Is patriotism essential to preserving national unity, sustaining vigorous commitment to just institutions, or motivating national service? Are the hazards of patriotism so great as to overshadow its potential benefits? Is there a genuinely virtuous form of patriotism that societies and schools should strive to cultivate?
 
In Patriotic Education in a Global Age, philosopher Randall Curren and historian Charles Dorn address these questions as they seek to understand what role patriotism might legitimately play in schools as an aspect of civic education. They trace the aims and rationales that have guided the inculcation of patriotism in American schools over the years, the methods by which schools have sought to cultivate patriotism, and the conceptions of patriotism at work in those aims, rationales, and methods. They then examine what those conceptions mean for justice, education, and human flourishing. Though the history of attempts to cultivate patriotism in schools offers both positive and cautionary lessons, Curren and Dorn ultimately argue that a civic education organized around three components of civic virtue—intelligence, friendship, and competence—and an inclusive and enabling school community can contribute to the development of a virtuous form of patriotism that is compatible with equal citizenship, reasoned dissent, global justice, and devotion to the health of democratic institutions and the natural environment. Patriotic Education in a Global Age mounts a spirited defense of democratic institutions as it situates an understanding of patriotism in the context of nationalist, populist, and authoritarian movements in the United States and Europe, and will be of interest to anyone concerned about polarization in public life and the future of democracy.
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cover of People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky

People Power

The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky

Aaron Schutz

Vanderbilt University Press, 2015

Saul Alinsky, according to Time Magazine in 1970, was a "prophet of power to the people," someone who "has possibly antagonized more people . . . than any other living American." People Power introduces the major organizers who adopted and modified Alinsky's vision across the United States:


--Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the Community Service Organization and National Farm Workers Association
--Nicholas von Hoffman and the Woodlawn Organization
--Tom Gaudette and the Northwest Community Organization
--Ed Chambers, Richard Harmon, and the Industrial Areas Foundation
--Shel Trapp, Gale Cincotta, and National People's Action
--Heather Booth, Midwest Academy, and Citizen Action
--Wade Rathke and ACORN


Weaving classic texts with interviews and their own context-setting commentaries, the editors of People Power provide the first comprehensive history of Alinsky-based organizing in the tumultuous period from 1955 to 1980, when the key organizing groups in the United States took form. Many of these selections--previously available only on untranscribed audiotapes or in difficult-to-read mimeograph or Xerox formats--appear in print here for the first time.

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cover of Politics for People: Finding a Responsible Public Voice

Politics for People

Finding a Responsible Public Voice

David Mathews

University of Illinois Press, 1999

A must for anyone angry at being shut out of the political system. David Mathews points out that many Americans, making no secret of their anger at being shut out of the political system, are looking for ways to take that system back. Because of their low opinion of "politics as usual," Mathews believes, some people are trying to create a politics relevant to their everyday lives. These efforts give us a richer understanding of political life and of a much-neglected subject: the public. In Politics for People, Mathews describes how people become politically engaged, how they build civic communities, and how they generate political energy or public will. He argues that political discussion is the doorway into politics, and he makes a case for leavening partisan debate with more public dialogue. He then explains what a democratic citizenry must do if representative government is to perform effectively, and he shows how officials might work with, and not just for, the public.
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cover of Populism in Latin America: Second Edition

Populism in Latin America

Second Edition

Michael L. Conniff

University of Alabama Press, 2012

A scholarly analysis of the origins, evolution, and enduring impact of populism in Latin American political life.

This updated edition of Populism in Latin America discusses new developments in populism as a political phenomenon and the emergence of new populist political figures in Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela in particular.

For more than one hundred years—from the beginning of the twentieth to the early twenty-first century—Latin American populists proved amazingly successful at gaining high office, holding on to power, maintaining their followings, and renewing their careers.  They raised more campaign money, got more voters to the polls,and held followers’ allegiances far better than traditional politicians.  Certainly some populist leaders were corrupt, others manipulated their followers, and still others disgraced themselves. Nevertheless, populist leaders were  extraordinarily effective in reaching masses of voters, and some left positive legacies for future generations.

Populism in Latin America examines the notion of populism in the political and social culture of Latin American societies as expressed through the populist leaders of several Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. This second edition also includes a new preface by Kenneth M. Roberts, professor of comparative and Latin American politics and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University.

Contributors
Jorge Basurto / Michael L. Conniff / Paul W. Drake / Steve Ellner / Joel Horowitz /
Kenneth M. Roberts / W. Frank Robinson /Ximena Sosa / Steve Stein / Kurt Weyland

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cover of Practical Politics: Five Principles for a Community That Works

Practical Politics

Five Principles for a Community That Works

Michael K. Briand

University of Illinois Press, 1999

This wise and sensible guide to practicing democracy will be invaluable to members of community and neighborhood organizations, parent-teacher associations, local government, citizens groups, and other grass-roots organizations. It will also be of interest to anyone wanting a deeper understanding of how democracy should work--and why it often fails to do just that.
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cover of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Catherine S. Ramírez

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.
 
 
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cover of Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us

Public Philosophy and Patriotism

Essays on the Declaration and Us

Paul Seaton

St. Augustine's Press, 2024

Paul Seaton’s Public Philosophy and Patriotism:  The Declaration and Us is a very countercultural book.  It advances the provocative thesis that not only is the Declaration worthy of our study today, but its principles and way of thinking about politics can and should be used to judge us and our politics today.   That’s countercultural.   While conservatives still have a warm place for the document in their hearts, one rarely hears them apply it to today’s debates.   Progressives tend to take two contradictory tacks toward the founding document:  on one hand, it’s the negligible product of hypocritical white males, on another, it limns the “ideals” and “values” of the American project that History is charged with fulfilling.  Neither of these views takes the document intellectually seriously.   Jefferson, however, articulated a different view when he called the Declaration “an expression of the American mind” at the time of the Revolution.  Here was a self-conscious, self-confident American mind, ready to take on the world.  Taking his cue from Jefferson, Seaton takes the Declaration seriously.  He takes it seriously as the expression of a mind that confidently judged despotic designs, but also grasped the principles of free government and free and reasonable politics and looked forward to a country embodying them.   Seaton argues that both these dimensions of Declaration political thought are applicable today.  
 
He does so in an interesting way.  For a number of years, he penned a Fourth of July essay on “the Declaration and Us” for the Law & Liberty website.   On that occasion, he provided an exposition of some theme of the Declaration and applied it to a contemporary debate or issue.  Over the years, they added up to a rather full exposition of the document, as well as an ongoing commentary on American political life.  With this collection, the essentials of the Declaration’s view of politics are laid bare, and significant threats to freedom-loving Americans are identified. This is the bold claim and aim of this unique book.  
 
At the beginning and end of the collection, Seaton makes a point of dating the completion of the manuscript on April 18th.  When the curious reader looks up the date, he finds that it is the date when Paul Revere undertook his famous ride.  In this way, the author indicates his judgment of the dire circumstances in which we live today and the patriotic models to which he hearkens.   In the form of an explication de texte, this collection is a call to arms against today’s enemies of ordered liberty.
 

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