Embodied Protests examines how Bolivia's hesitant courtship with globalization manifested in the visceral and emotional diseases that afflicted many Bolivian women. Drawing on case studies conducted among market- and working-class women in the provincial town of Punata, Maria Tapias examines how headaches and debilidad, so-called normal bouts of infant diarrhea, and the malaise oppressing whole communities were symptomatic of profound social suffering. She approaches the narratives of distress caused by poverty, domestic violence, and the failure of social networks as constituting the knowledge that shaped their understandings of well-being. At the crux of Tapias's definitive analysis is the idea that individual health perceptions, actions, and practices cannot be separated from local cultural narratives or from global and economic forces. Evocative and compassionate, Embodied Protests gives voice to the human costs of the ongoing neoliberal experiment.

Embodied Activisms explores how activists use their bodies to resist social norms, engage with institutions, and promote change. This book spans historical perspectives, current contexts, and the most current scholarly literature to interrogate how embodied activisms are read, performed, understood, and actualized. The studies in this volume address current, critical issues such as police accountability activism, the climate crisis, environmental concerns, and protests of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Chapters analyze a wide range of nonviolent mobilization tactics, including silent protests, embodied witnessing, leisure spectacle demonstrations, performance art and other forms of creative practice, and rallies. Analyses engage with aspects of intersectionality in activism and critique diverse modes of embodied resistance in locations including East Central Europe, the Americas, and the Mediterranean region.

An illuminating study of how former Korean "comfort women" and their supporters have redressed history through protests, tribunals, theater, and memorial-building projects

Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change is the first collection to gather together prominent scholars on yoga and the body. Using an intersectional lens, the essays examine yoga in the United States as a complex cultural phenomenon that reveals racial, economic, gendered, and sexual politics of the body. From discussions of the stereotypical yoga body to analyses of pivotal court cases, Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change examines the sociopolitical tensions of contemporary yoga. Because so many yogic spaces reflect the oppressive nature of many other public spheres, the essays in this collection also examine what needs to change in order for yoga to truly live up to its liberatory potential, from the blogosphere around Black women’s health to the creation of queer and trans yoga classes to the healing potential of yoga for people living with chronic illness or trauma. While many of these conversations are emerging in the broader public sphere, few have made their way into academic scholarship. This book changes all that. The essays in this anthology interrogate yoga as it is portrayed in the media, yoga spaces, and yoga as it is integrated in education, the law, and concepts of health to examine who is included and who is excluded from yoga in the West. The result is a thoughtful analysis of the possibilities and the limitations of yoga for feminist social transformation.

A radically different approach to social and environmental justice work for fans of adrienne maree brown and Bessel van der Kolk Instead of thinking about social justice as a process that starts with changing people's minds, Embodied Activism understands our bodies--how we feel in them and relate to others through them--as the sites of transformation How do ordinary people with busy lives leverage our actions in support of liberation, justice, and authentic connection? How can activists and social change-makers avoid burning out? How does the body factor into what our social movements miss? Drawing on the somatic arts, trauma-informed psychology, and anti-oppressive movements, Embodied Activism helps us explore and transform the political realities of our everyday lives in a new way: by harnessing the felt experience of our bodies as the sites of our activism. Rae Johnson teaches us to listen to our body language--and to question body image norms. They show us how to reconnect to our sensual capacities, which we can lose sight of in a non-stop, nervous-system-hijacking world. They give us tools and exercises to nourish ourselves and protect our bodies, minds, and spirits from the toll that activism can take. And they teach us about nonverbal communication styles and how to connect with each other in joyful, authentic community. Embodied Activism is written for embodiment professionals, community organizers, and all readers looking for new tools and perspectives for changing the world, one body at a time.

Natural resource extraction has fueled protest movements in Latin America and existing research has drawn considerable scholarly attention to the politics of antimarket contention at the national level, particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. Despite its residents reporting the third-highest level of protest participation in the region, Peru has been largely ignored in these discussions. In this groundbreaking study, Moises Arce exposes a long-standing climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action. Through empirical analysis of protest events over thirty-one years, extensive personal interviews with policymakers and societal actors, and individual case studies of major protest episodes, Arce follows the ebb and flow of Peruvian protests over time and space to show the territorial unevenness of democracy, resource extraction, and antimarket contentions. Employing political process theory, Arce builds an interactive framework that views the moderating role of democracy, the quality of institutional representation as embodied in political parties, and most critically, the level of political party competition as determinants in the variation of protest and subsequent government response. Overall, he finds that both the fluidity and fragmentation of political parties at the subnational level impair the mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness often attributed to party competition.Thus, as political fragmentation increases, political opportunities expand, and contention rises. These dynamics in turn shape the long-term development of the state. Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru will inform students and scholars of globalization, market transitions, political science, contentious politics and Latin America generally, as a comparative analysis relating natural resource extraction to democratic processes both regionally and internationally.

30 movement performers, therapists, artists, teachers and colleagues from around the world describe the impact of Prapto's Amerta Movement on their lives and work.

In September 1980, eight Catholic activists made their way into a Pennsylvania General Electric plant housing parts for nuclear missiles. Evading security guards, these activists pounded on missile nose cones with hammers and then covered the cones in their own blood. This act of nonviolent resistance was their answer to calls for prophetic witness in the Old Testament: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war.” Plowshares explores the closely interwoven religious and social significance of the group’s use of performance to achieve its goals. It looks at the group’s acts of civil disobedience, such as that undertaken at the GE plant in 1980, and the Plowshares’ behavior at the legal trials that result from these protests. Interpreting the Bible as a mandate to enact God’s kingdom through political resistance, the Plowshares work toward “symbolic disarmament,” with the aim of eradicating nuclear weapons. Plowshares activists continue to carry out such “divine obediences” against facilities where equipment used in the production or deployment of nuclear weapons is manufactured or stored. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their actions, this volume helps us better understand their motivations, logic, identity, and ultimate goal.

Through assessing Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field, this research project examines how re-sistance can be understood as an embodied experience. Six resistors are asked in semi-structured and dia-logic interviews how they experience resistance to oppression of various forms including patriarchy, co-lonialism, cisheteronormativity, and capitalism. Three main themes emerge from these interviews and in-clude: the construction of a resistant habitus, the occurrence of solidarity through which resistant habitus may mobilize, and the possibility of transforming oppressive fields such as patriarchy into fields of femi-nist resistance. Through instances of increased awareness of one's social struggle, developments of mo-bile solidarity, and the occupation of oppressive fields in the name of social change, this project posits that habitus are capable of enacting change upon the field.

Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure is an edited collection that explores activism as a leisure activity and protests as events.