Advocacy & Activism 

Segment Mission
 

By organizing, strategizing, mobilizing, and educating, advocates and activists are currently helping to bring about important social, political, and cultural changes throughout the world. We define “activism” and “social movements” as collective action to exert pressure on centers of power in order to remedy grievances and felt injustices. While this program is committed to understanding and analyzing all kinds of activism, it has a special interest in movements of populations that are socially, culturally, and economically marginalized. From migrant Latinos advocating for labor rights in the US to indigenous people mobilizing in Ecuador, from transnational movements for fair trade to low-income people right here in Syracuse organizing  to advocate for themselves, this program seeks to analyze the social forces that generate, sustain, and weaken social movements, and to grasp the impacts such movements are having on the modern world. We have a special interest in understanding the complex relationships between grassroots actors, nongovernmental actors, and states at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. We also have a special interest in working to deepen and enrich reflection and action at the interface between academic analysis and effective social action, through direct, institutional, and extra-institutional processes.

By organizing, strategizing, mobilizing, and educating, advocates and activists are currently helping to bring about important social, political, and cultural changes throughout the world. We define “activism” and “social movements” as collective action to exert pressure on centers of power in order to remedy grievances and felt injustices. While this program is committed to understanding and analyzing all kinds of activism, it has a special interest in movements of populations that are socially, culturally, and economically marginalized. From migrant Latinos advocating for labor rights in the US to indigenous people mobilizing in Ecuador, from transnational movements for fair trade to low-income people right here in Syracuse organizing  to advocate for themselves, this program seeks to analyze the social forces that generate, sustain, and weaken social movements, and to grasp the impacts such movements are having on the modern world. We have a special interest in understanding the complex relationships between grassroots actors, nongovernmental actors, and states at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. We also have a special interest in working to deepen and enrich reflection and action at the interface between academic analysis and effective social action, through direct, institutional, and extra-institutional processes. 
 

The PARCC Labor Studies Series  2011-12 Lecture Series topics for the Fall 2011 are:

 Thursday, September 1, 2011- Taken for a Ride: Guestworkers in the U.S. in 060 Eggers Hall, the Global Collaboratory at 4:00 p.m. with guests David Griffiths from East Carolina University, Rachel Micah-Jones and Martin Davila  from Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM) that works to organize and improve working conditions for migrant workers in the U.S. and Rebecca Fuentes, coordinator of the Workers' Center of Central New York.  For more information, click here.   

Friday, October 28, 2011 from 2-4 p.m. in 500 Hall of Languages -- “Labor and Community Organizing: a Labor Studies Symposium."
Janice Fine, Professor at Rutgers University and Author of Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream. Ian Macdonald, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. Jeffrey Bellamy, Executive Director of Syracuse Alliance for a New Economy. Mark Spadafore, Political Organizer for SEIU Local 1199. 

In the Spring 2012 semester  the panel topics will be Panel 1- Transnational Labor Organizing and Panel 2- The Challenges to State Sector Workers of the Current Economic Crisis.