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Throughout the world, from the United States to Tanzania, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka, everyday people are working together and taking actions to improve their lives, end inequality, and change global society. Action groups and movements see dialogue and learning as important ways to extend democracy and, with its inclusiveness, remake society. Long-term change often takes place in civil society and its institutions. By putting strategy with theory, local groups and movements are able to begin making changes in institutions that allow people to begin living in new ways. Inclusive, multicultural projects make dedicated efforts to end hierarchy and global injustice and reinvent culture, ideas, and social relations.
Written for laypeople and students interested in change, these multidisciplinary essays take readers on a journey of discovery as they show how various groups have brought theory and action together to make urban, rural, and transnational change. These case studies and explanatory articles reveal how feminist, antiracist, ecological, and peace movements reinforce each other. This collection is an analytical organizing tool that demonstrates how people can initiate well-placed and enduring change. The writings also identify the inadequacies of academic change theories and highlight the contributions of intellectual activists across the world.
* Social change is made by groups that take democracy beyond the realm of electoral politics and use its processes as a central way to discuss needs, ideas, and ways to make social change.
* Women and feminists (those who work for equality at all levels, changing issues around gender and sexuality, race, and the global order) have emerged at the heart of this grassroots democratization process.
* Many movements seem to be converging as part of this democratic, local to global change. These movements work to end inequalities, to open up new ways of thinking, and to create more open cultures.
* Environmental and peace movements often generate democratic activists that take up women’s causes and vice versa. A lot of this change takes place in civil society, in neighborhoods and rural areas that are somewhat removed from the centers of power.
* Participatory action groups are learning how to make change; change is fundamentally an educational process that helps institutions meet more people’s needs.
* This book covers diverse theories, ways to bring about change, and the history of change. It is multicultural and transnational, including numerous case studies of social change groups
