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Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilians have turned to documentaries to explain their country to themselves and to the world. In a magisterial history covering one hundred years of cinema, Darlene J. Sadlier identifies Brazilians’ unique contributions to a diverse genre while exploring how that genre has, in turn, contributed to the making and remaking of Brazil.

A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film is a comprehensive tour of feature and short films that have charted the social and political story of modern Brazil. The Amazon appears repeatedly and vividly. Sometimes—as in a prize-winning 1922 feature—the rainforest is a galvanizing site of national pride; at other times, the Amazon has been a focus for land-reform and Indigenous-rights activists. Other key documentary themes include Brazil’s swings from democracy to dictatorship, tensions between cosmopolitanism and rurality, and shifting attitudes toward race and gender. Sadlier also provides critical perspectives on aesthetics and media technology, exploring how documentaries inspired dramatic depictions of poverty and migration in the country’s Northeast and examining Brazilians’ participation in streaming platforms that have suddenly democratized filmmaking.

Articulating Dissent analyses the new communicative strategies of coalition protest movements and how these impact on a mainstream media unaccustomed to fractured articulations of dissent.

Pollyanna Ruiz shows how coalition protest movements against austerity, war and globalisation build upon the communicative strategies of older single issue campaigns such as the anti-criminal justice bill protests and the women’s peace movement. She argues that such protest groups are dismissed in the mainstream for not articulating a ‘unified position’ and explores the way in which contemporary protesters stemming from different traditions maintain solidarity.

Articulating Dissent investigates the ways in which this diversity, so inherent in coalition protest, affects the movement of ideas from the political margins to the mainstream. In doing so this book offers an insightful and original analysis of the protest coalition as a developing political form.

Narratives of the 1960s typically describe an ascending arc of political activism that peaked in 1968, then began a precipitous descent as the revolutionary dreams of the New Left failed to come to fruition. The May 1970 killings at Kent State often stand as an epitaph to a decade of protest, after which the principal story becomes the resurgence of the right.

In Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990, Robert Surbrug challenges this prevailing paradigm by examining three protest movements that were direct descendants of Vietnam-era activism: the movement against nuclear energy; the nuclear weapons freeze movement; and the Central American solidarity movement. Drawing lessons from the successes and failures of the preceding era, these movements had a significant impact on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which itself had been undergoing major transformations in the wake of the 1960s.

By focusing on one state—Massachusetts—Surbrug is able to illuminate the interaction between the activist left and mainstream liberalism, showing how each influenced the other and how together they helped shape the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. During these years, Massachusetts emerged as a center of opposition to nuclear power, the continuing Cold War arms race, and Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Central America. The state's role in national policy was greatly enhanced by prominent political figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy, Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O'Neill, presidential candidate Governor Michael Dukakis, Vietnam veteran Senator John Kerry, and moderate Republican Silvio Conte. 

What Beyond Vietnam shows is that the rise of the right in the aftermath of the 1960s was by no means a unilateral ascendancy. Instead it involved a bifurcation of American politics in which an increasingly strong conservative movement was vigorously contested by an activist left and a reinvigorated mainstream liberalism.

A comparative analysis of women’s struggle for change in India.

The women’s movement in India has a long and rich history in which millions of women live, work, and struggle to survive in order to remake their family, home, and social lives. Whether fighting for safe contraception, literacy, water, and electricity or resisting sexual harassment, they are participating in vibrant and active women’s movements that are thriving in many parts of India today.

Many people around the world are frustrated with their governments yet do not know what actions to take. Protest may feel out of reach, like something only seasoned activists can do. This accessible guide explores the creativity, joy, and accessibility of peaceful protest. Megan Hershey introduces readers to twenty-five specific and inspiring nonviolent protest methods through real-life examples from the past fifty years. Each chapter includes a short, vivid description of a bold nonviolent action taken by everyday people who demanded that their leaders listen to them. From patriotic choir concerts in Estonia to live painted pigs at the Ugandan parliament, these unique protest strategies will inspire those looking to effect change and offer encouragement from past successes.

Paperwork is the new protest: leveraging bureaucracy for progressive action

In contemporary higher education, power increasingly circulates through documents rather than debate, making paperwork one of the most consequential sites of protest. Yet as universities become more corporatized and subject to authoritarian influence, bureaucratic writing is often treated as passive, procedural, or politically neutral. Paper Pusher shows how paperwork is a central mechanism of governance and therefore a formidable, underused medium for democratic action and protest within bureaucracies.

Kathryn J. Gindlesparger reframes the “paper pusher” from a symbol of compliance into an agent of institutional accountability and resistance. She develops four avenues for protesting through bureaucracy—voice, filing, circulation, and stasis-seeking—showing how everyday documents such as meeting minutes, policy drafts, budgets, and accreditation reports can be used to push back against authoritarian and corporate forces that undermine an institution’s mission. Rather than emphasizing visible confrontation, Paper Pusher demonstrates how activism can operate quietly and credibly from within systems where overt protest may carry professional risk.

Grounded in story and lived experience, this book is a love letter to office workers, staff, and middle managers whose labor sustains institutions and whose expertise is often overlooked. It foregrounds feminist, working-class, queer, disabled, Black, and brown voices, highlighting how marginalized workers have long used bureaucratic knowledge to create access, protection, and change. Practical and people-centered, Paper Pusher calls for bureaucratic literacy to be taught wherever writing is taught, insisting that paperwork is not grunt work but power work.

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Protest in Belgrade addresses one of the most important social movements of this decade - the civil and student peace demonstrations which took place in Belgrade during the winter of 1996/97. The demonstrations, the largest ever in history, were in response to Milošević’s nullifying of the results of local elections in fourteen towns in Serbia which created global media attention and attracted worldwide sympathy.

This in-depth study of a society calling for democracy is based on interviews with over 1000 civilians and students. The book is unique because much of the research was carried out and completed while the demonstrations were still in progress and before the outcome of events was known. A chronology of events is also included.

The book provides an abundance of valuable information for analysts of post-socialist transformation, researchers of social movements and social change, and for all those concerned with the tragic events in Southeast Europe.

Students played a critical role in the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, helping to topple the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979—one of only two successful social revolutions in Cold War Latin America. Debunking misconceptions, Students of Revolution provides new evidence that groups of college and secondary-level students were instrumental in fostering a culture of insurrection—one in which societal groups, from elite housewives to rural laborers, came to see armed revolution as not only legitimate but necessary.

Drawing on student archives, state and university records, and oral histories, Claudia Rueda reveals the tactics by which young activists deployed their age, class, and gender to craft a heroic identity that justified their political participation and to help build cross-class movements that eventually paralyzed the country. Despite living under a dictatorship that sharply curtailed expression, these students gained status as future national leaders, helping to sanctify their right to protest and generating widespread outrage while they endured the regime’s repression. Students of Revolution thus highlights the aggressive young dissenters who became the vanguard of the opposition.

Public protests are a vital tool for asserting grievances and creating temporary, yet tangible, communities as the world becomes more democratic and urban in the twenty-first century. While the political and social aspects of protest have been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the physical spaces in which protests happen. Yet place is a crucial aspect of protests, influencing the dynamics and engagement patterns among participants. In The Design of Protest, Tali Hatuka offers the first extensive discussion of the act of protest as a design: that is, a planned event in a space whose physical geometry and symbolic meaning are used and appropriated by its organizers, who aim to challenge socio-spatial distance between political institutions and the people they should serve.

Presenting case studies from around the world, including Tiananmen Square in Beijing; the National Mall in Washington, DC; Rabin Square in Tel Aviv; and the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Hatuka identifies three major dimensions of public protests: the process of planning the protest in a particular place; the choice of spatial choreography of the event, including the value and meaning of specific tactics; and the challenges of performing contemporary protests in public space in a fragmented, complex, and conflicted world. Numerous photographs, detailed diagrams, and plans complement the case studies, which draw upon interviews with city officials, urban planners, and protesters themselves.

Despite gloomy prophecies, democracy and the market economy seem to be taking root throughout Central and Eastern Europe, although set against a background of a recession deeper and longer than that of the Great Depression. How is this possible? Why did Eastern Europeans protest less about the brutal social consequences of systemic change than the people of Latin America a decade earlier? Why has the region-wide authoritarian or populist turnabout not occurred? Why has democracy in these countries proved to be crisis-proof? In what ways has economic crisis impacted on the politics of the region?

In addressing these questions, Béla Greskovits uses a comparative analysis of the structures, institutions, cultures, and actors shaping both the Eastern European and the Latin American transformations. He argues that structural, institutional, and cultural factors have put a brake on destabilizing collective actions and have paved the way for the emergence of the enduring, low-level equilibrium between incomplete democracy and imperfect market economy which seems set to characterize the Central and Eastern European experience for the foreseeable future.