Insurgent Social Studies

Social studies education over its hundred-year history has often focused on predominantly white and male narratives. This has not only been detrimental to the increasingly diverse population of the U.S., but it has also meant that social studies as a field of scholarship has systematically excluded and marginalized the voices, teaching, and research of women, scholars of color, queer scholars, and scholars whose politics challenge the dominant traditions of history, geography, economics, and civics education. Insurgent Social Studies intervenes in the field of social studies education by highlighting those whose work has often been deemed “too radical.” Insurgent Social Studies is essential reading to all researchers and practitioners in social studies, and is perfect as an adopted text in the social studies curriculum at Colleges of Education.

This fully revised and updated edition includes twelve new chapters on contemporary topics such as ecological democracy, Native studies, inquiry teaching, and Islamophobia. The Social Studies Curriculum, Fourth Edition updates the definitive overview of the issues teachers face when creating learning experiences for students in social studies. The book connects the diverse elements of the social studies curriculum—civic, global, social issues—offering a unique and critical perspective that separates it from other texts. Completely updated, this book includes twelve new chapters on the history of the social studies; democratic social studies; citizenship education; anarchist inspired transformative social studies; patriotism; ecological democracy; Native studies; inquiry teaching; Islamophobia; capitalism and class struggle; gender, sex, sexuality, and youth experiences in school; and critical media literacy. All the chapters from the previous edition have been thoroughly revised and updated, including those on teaching social studies in the age of curriculum standardization and high-stakes testing, critical multicultural social studies, prejudice and racism, assessment, and teaching democracy. Readers are encouraged to reconsider their assumptions and understanding about the origins, purposes, nature, and possibilities of the social studies curriculum. E. Wayne Ross is Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has written and edited many books, including (with Abraham P. DeLeon) Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies, and Social Education: New Perspectives for Social Studies Education.

Winner of the EDRA book prize for 2012. In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ‘insurgent public spaces’ challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighbourhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities. With nearly twenty illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco. Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilized in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.

This updated third edition contains new chapters on important issues—including race, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism—affecting social studies education.

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where people come together to give themselves, to nurture life, to renew their spirits, sustain their hopes, and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle an ongoing practice. This 25th anniversary edition continues the dialogue with "In Solidarity," their 2016 conversation at the bell hooks Institute on racism, politics, popular culture and the contemporary Black experience.

This volume offers a critical re-examination of colonial and anti-colonial resistance imageries and practices in imperial history. It offers a fresh critique of both pejorative and celebratory readings of ‘insurgent peoples’, and it seeks to revitalize the study of ‘resistance’ as an analytical field in the comparative history of Western colonialisms. It explores how to read and (de)code these issues in archival documents – and how to conjugate documental approaches with oral history, indigenous memories, and international histories of empire. The topics explored include runaway slaves and slave rebellions, mutiny and banditry, memories and practices of guerrilla and liberation, diplomatic negotiations and cross-border confrontations, theft, collaboration, and even the subversive effects of nature in colonial projects of labor exploitation.

Insurgent cohesion is central to explaining patterns of violence, the effectiveness of counterinsurgency, and civil war outcomes. Cohesive insurgent groups produce more effective war-fighting forces and are more credible negotiators; organizational cohesion shapes both the duration of wars and their ultimate resolution. In Networks of Rebellion, Paul Staniland explains why insurgent leaders differ so radically in their ability to build strong organizations and why the cohesion of armed groups changes over time during conflicts. He outlines a new way of thinking about the sources and structure of insurgent groups, distinguishing among integrated, vanguard, parochial, and fragmented groups. Staniland compares insurgent groups, their differing social bases, and how the nature of the coalitions and networks within which these armed groups were built has determined their discipline and internal control. He examines insurgent groups in Afghanistan, 1975 to the present day, Kashmir (1988–2003), Sri Lanka from the 1970s to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and several communist uprisings in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The initial organization of an insurgent group depends on the position of its leaders in prewar political networks. These social bases shape what leaders can and cannot do when they build a new insurgent group. Counterinsurgency, insurgent strategy, and international intervention can cause organizational change. During war, insurgent groups are embedded in social ties that determine they how they organize, fight, and negotiate; as these ties shift, organizational structure changes as well.

In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.