This paper first develops the methodology of participatory action research as a research process originating from community-defined needs, involving community members in conducting the research, and leading to community-based action Within this research model, we discuss the difficulty of integrating the roles of activist and researcher Secondly, the paper describes the outcomes of the coordina...

This paper, based on in-depth interviews with thirty-three individuals involved in the burgeoning Menstrual Activism movement, explores why the identity ‘activist’ is resisted among some social movement actors. Drawing on a ‘perfect standard’ of politics and activism grounded in the core values of rigor and humility, an activist must ‘live the issue’, demonstrate relentless dedication, and cont...

UK "Psychiatric Survivors"-a variety of activist groups comprising individuals who have been on the "receiving end" of psychiatric treatment-have, since the mid-1980s, mounted a challenge to the psychiatric system. "Survivors" have formulated their own knowledge-base concerning a range of human problems hitherto regarded as the province of "official" psychiatry only. "Official" knowledge stress...

*The paper has benefited from comments obtained at presentations of an earlier version at the Technical University, Dresden and Jadavpur University, Calcutta. We would like to sincerely thank Jean-Pierre Ponssard for his useful remarks. The first author acknowledges support from FMSH, Paris. The second author acknowledges support from the program " Chair for Sustainable Finance and Responsible ...

Screen and song celebrate social justice movements that protested in the streets when they were convinced that existing institutions and their normal procedures only reinforced the status quo. Many rights have been won in democratic societies by means of courageous activism — the eight hour day, votes for women, the right to sit at any lunch counter. Yet contemporary democratic theory rarely re...

Consumption of green products is growing rapidly in the United States. We assessed the extent to which this consumption is motivated by a desire to promote societal-level change in corporate practices that affect the climate, and posit a social–cognitive model in which people’s global warming beliefs and consumer activism beliefs predict their green purchasing goals, behavior, and opinion leade...

The focus of this paper is that actual political systems do not appear to satisfy the property of convergence to an electoral center that is often predicted by formal vote models. The key theoretical idea is that the convergence result need not hold if there is an asymmetry in the electoral perception of the “quality” of party leaders (Stokes 1992). The average weight given to the perceived qua...