Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an influential African American civil rights and human rights activist. For five decades, she worked behind the scenes with people in vulnerable communities to catalyze social justice leadership. Her steadfast belief in the power of ordinary people to create change continues to inspire social justice activists around the world. This book describes a case study that translates Ella Baker’s community engagement philosophy into a catalytic leadership praxis, which others can adapt for their work. Catalytic leadership is a concrete set of communication practices for social justice leadership produced in equitable partnership with, instead of on, communities. The case centers the voices of African American teenage girls who were living in a segregated neighborhood of an affluent college town and became part of a small collective of college students, parents, university faculty, and community activists learning leadership in the spirit of Ella Baker.

Praise for ELLA BAKER "Splendid biography . . . a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on the critical roles of women in civil rights."--Joyce A. Ladner, The Washington Post Book World "The definitive biography of Ella Baker, a force behind the civil rights movement and almost every social justice movement of this century."--Gloria Steinem "This book will be received with plaudits for its empathy, insightfulness, and gendered narration of an astonishingly neglected life that was pivotal in the pursuit of American justice and humanity."--David Levering Lewis Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W. E. B. Du Bois "Pathbreaking. By illuminating the little-known story of how profoundly Ella Baker influenced the most radical activists of the era, Grant's graceful portrayal reveals Miss Baker's transformative impact on recent history."--Kathleen Cleaver

Learn about the civil rights activist Ella Baker in this inspiring picture book from Sibert Honor winner Patricia Hruby Powell and Caldecott Honor winner R. Gregory Christie. “What do you hope to accomplish?” asked Ella Baker’s granddaddy when she was still a child. Her mother provided the answer: “Lift as you climb.” Long before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, Ella Baker worked to lift others up by fighting racial injustice and empowering poor African Americans to stand up for their rights. Her dedication and grassroots work in many communities made her a valuable ally for leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and she has been ranked as one of the most influential women in the civil rights movement. In the 1960s she worked to register voters and organize sit-ins, and she became a teacher and mentor to many young activists. Caldecott Honor winner R. Gregory Christie’s powerful pictures pair with Patricia Hruby Powell’s poignant words to paint a vivid portrait of the fight for the freedom of the human spirit.

An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines. West, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both “the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century” and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois “undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century” and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even “Santaclausified” Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X’s radical spirit and fearless speech, but has “often become the victim of public amnesia.” By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire.

Full of informative and inspiring examples of collaboration, Community Conversations captures the essence of creating such conversations and offers ten practical techniques to host conversations in your community."--Pub. desc.

This book focuses on partnerships at the most basic level of interaction – between two people as they work toward common goals. Interpersonal dynamics described in this book are intended to guide formal and institutional relationships between members of a community or community organization on the one hand and representatives from campus on the other. Collaborative communication principles and practices shared can form a foundation for individuals to build flexible, lasting relationships that will weather most challenges and sustain the larger partnerships of their respective organizations.This book offers a conceptual framework of collaborative communication to build and sustain partnerships, recognizing that relationships change over time as the people involved and their circumstances evolve. Collaborative communication uses a repertoire of knowledge and skills that allow partners to make choices that fit their situation or context and to work through differences and challenges as they occur, to include managing conflict and navigating cultural differences. It further takes into account the different means of communication, whether face-to-face, using e-mail, text messaging, or social media. Readers will appreciate the numerous real world examples that illustrate and bring its key concepts to life.This book is addressed to partners at all levels focused on community engagement and service-learning. It is intended for preparing college students to work more effectively in the community, as well as for workshops for community and campus members who work with service-learning students. It can equally be used in leadership workshops in academic and community settings. Scholars, students, or community members involved in community engaged research will also find useable ideas for their work. The appendices offer an annotated bibliography of useful resources and provide readers with a repertoire of activities for building a collaborative communication repertoire.

During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.

Scholars in many fields increasingly find themselves caught between the academy, with its demands for rigor and objectivity, and direct engagement in social activism. Some advocate on behalf of the communities they study; others incorporate the knowledge and leadership of their informants directly into the process of knowledge production. What ethical, political, and practical tensions arise in the course of such work? In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholar-activists map the terrain on which political engagement and academic rigor meet. Contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Edmund T. Gordon, Davydd Greenwood, Joy James, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, George Lipsitz, Samuel Martínez, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Dani Nabudere, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Jemima Pierre, Laura Pulido, Shannon Speed, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, João Vargas

Winner of the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship Analyzes the rhetoric of contemporary sex panics to expose how homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia define public, political, and scholarly preoccupations with sexuality and gender In Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions, Ian Barnard makes the counter-intuitive argument that contemporary “sex panics” are undergirded by queerphobia, even when the panics in question don’t appear to have much to do with queerness. Barnard presents six case studies that treat a wide range of sex panic rhetorics around child molesters, sex trafficking, transgenderism, incest, queer kids, and pedagogy to demonstrate this argument. By using examples from academic scholarship, political discourse, and popular culture, including the Kevin Spacey scandal and the award-winning film Moonlight, Barnard shows how homophobia and transphobia continue to pervade contemporary Western culture. Barnard is concerned not so much with looking at the overt homophobia and transphobia that are the more obvious objects of antihomophobic and antitransphobic critique. The author’s focus, rather, is on excavating the significant traces of these panics in a neoliberal culture that has supposedly demonstrated its civility by its embrace of diversity, renunciation of its homophobic past, and attentiveness to the transgender revolution that has swept popular media and political culture in the United States and elsewhere. During a time of increasing conservative backlashes against advancing LGBTQ rights and human rights discourses in general, this book shows why it is important to attend to the liberal covers for sex panics that are not too far removed from their rhetorically conservative cousins.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book defines the new field of "Bioeconomy" as the sustainable and innovative use of biomass and biological knowledge to provide food, feed, industrial products, bioenergy and ecological services. The chapters highlight the importance of bioeconomy-related concepts in public, scientific, and political discourse. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors outline the dimensions of the bioeconomy as a means of achieving sustainability. The authors are ideally situated to elaborate on the diverse aspects of the bioeconomy. They have acquired in-depth experience of interdisciplinary research through the university’s focus on “Bioeconomy”, its contribution to the Bioeconomy Research Program of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, and its participation in the German Bioeconomy Council. With the number of bioeconomy-related projects at European universities rising, this book will provide graduate students and researchers with background information on the bioeconomy. It will familiarize scientific readers with bioeconomy-related terms and give scientific background for economists, agronomists and natural scientists alike.