Out Of The Mainstream

A behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of LGBT media activism during a period of rapid societal change.

"Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American communities in south-western USA. The problem is that throughout history, these nation-states have attempted to 'civilize' and bring into the mainstream the different cultures and peoples within their borders instead of understanding 'context' and harnessing the strengths and potentials of diversity. This book examines the multi-scale struggles for cultural justice and socio-economic re-distribution that arise as Latin American communities and user federations seek access to water resources and decision-making power regarding their control and management. It is set in the dynamic context of unequal, globalizing power relations, politics of scale and identity, environmental encroachment and the increasing presence of extractive industries that are creating additional pressures on local livelihoods. While much of the focus of the book is on the Andean Region, a number of comparative chapters are also included. These address issues such as water rights and defence strategies in neighbouring countries and those of Native American people in the southern USA, as well as state reform and multi-culturalism across Latin and Native America and the use of international standards in struggles for indigenous water rights. This book shows that, against all odds, people are actively contesting neoliberal globalization and water power plays. In doing so, they construct new, hybrid water rights systems, livelihoods, cultures and hydro-political networks, and dynamically challenge the mainstream powers and politics."--Publisher's description.

Coming Out to the Mainstream is a collection of essays written from a range of perspectives, from scholars to film producers, who seek to contextualize and reframe New Queer Cinema from a 21st century perspective—decades after Stonewall, the emergence of the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the initial years of the gay marriage movement. These essays situate themselves in the 21st century as an attempt to assess what appears to be a mainstreaming of New Queer Cinema, a current wave of New Queer Cinema film that holds potential for influencing film viewers beyond the original limits of an independent film audience, critics, and the academy. Specifically, these essays examine whether and how the filmmaking styles and themes of New Queer Cinema have been mainstreamed—rendered familiar as points of interest in popular culture of the 21st century, challenging a queer-phobic cultural climate, and providing an incisive set of visual representations that can help inform continuing debates over queerness in public culture. For instance, what do we make of the burgeoning number of queer stories that are circulating not just in arthouses but in mainstream media? How much of a transformation in our collective sensibilities does this trend represent, and will it carry us toward a cultural landscape where identity is commonly understood and valued as multiple, fluid, and performative? While the editors of this collection find there is significant evidence that New Queer Cinema has achieved success in forging greater mainstream acceptance of queer perspectives in cinema and everyday culture, the essays we present offer a variety of voices, a timely set of observations on queer images in film, television, and popular culture.

In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation--that the social distance separating immigrants and their children from the mainstream of American society closes over time--seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past. Assimilation is still driven, in claim, by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. But they also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans. Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life. And they predict that it will blur the boundaries among the major, racially defined populations, as nonwhites and Hispanics are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream.

The legitimate role of the state in relation to property and the justification of property institutions of various kinds are matters of increasing concern in the modern world. Political and social theorists, jurists, economists, and historians have taken positions for and against the property institutions upheld in their time by the state, and further dehate seems inevitable. This book brings together ten classic statements which set out the main arguments that are now appealed to and places them in historical and critical perspective. The extracts presented here – all substantial – are from Loeke, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Mill, Green, Veblen, Tawney, Morris Cohen, and Charles Reich. A note hy the editor at the head of each extract highlights the arguments in it and relates it to the time at which it was written. Professor Macpherson's introductory and concluding essays expose the roots of some common misconceptions of property, identify current changes in the concept of property, and predict future changes. Macpherson argues that a specific change in the concept (which now appears possible) is needed to rescue liberal democracy from its present impasse. Property is both a valuable text on a crucial topic in political and social theory and a significant contribution to the continuing debate

A riveting, incisive account of some of the most complex politics in modern Canada, from the founder of the World Sikh Organization of Canada. An Uncommon Road is the celebration of an extraordinarily resilient people and a moving roadmap for how individuals, and a community, can fight for their own social justice and gain justice for all.

Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. To quote a famous Internet meme, trolling is why we can't have nice things online. Or at least that's what we have been led to believe. In this provocative book, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn't all that deviant. Trolls' actions are born of and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses -- which are just as damaging as the trolls' most disruptive behaviors. Phillips describes, for example, the relationship between trolling and sensationalist corporate media -- pointing out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for media, it's a business strategy. She shows how trolls, "the grimacing poster children for a socially networked world," align with social media. And she documents how trolls, in addition to parroting media tropes, also offer a grotesque pantomime of dominant cultural tropes, including gendered notions of dominance and success and an ideology of entitlement. We don't just have a trolling problem, Phillips argues; we have a culture problem. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things isn't only about trolls; it's about a culture in which trolls thrive.

Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed "upscale" consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites. Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function.