Suchergebnisse

The global intellectual property regime is no longer fit for purpose. As the networked, digital age matures, it puts into the hands of millions of citizens the tools to access create and share "content": text, pictures, music and video; data, news, analysis and art. Against this, the intellectual property regime falters. It presents citizens with a choice: stop using the technology -- stop communicating, stop creating -- or break the law.Legal reform is presented with two separate challenges. The first is a small but vocal minority of entrenched corporate interests -- the rightsholder lobby. Wedded to business models that pre-date the age of networked digital technology, they exploit their position as incumbents to influence legislators. Often representing the world's biggest multinational corporations, they hijack a narrative that belongs to poor artists struggling in garrets and use the considerable profits they have made from exploiting these artists in the twentieth century to access the corridors of power and make their case.That legislators listen is related to a second, geopolitical, challenge. Since the 1970s, the developed world has sought to use the global intellectual property regime to ensure its continued prosperity. Motivated by the ability of developing countries to undercut it on the global manufacturing market, it has sought to augment the financial privilege afforded to "knowledge workers". The self-interest behind this practice is masked by a flawed orthodoxy that is rarely backed up by evidence -- that more intellectual property provision is always good for economic growth.Against this backdrop, a global IP reform movement (also called the access to knowledge movement) is emerging. Motivated by a range of concerns -- from global justice, to the narrowing spectrum of permitted speech, to the broadening of surveillance power -- these individuals and organisations approach their campaigning work with combined levels of ingenuity and intellectual rigour that make them stand out in the history of fledgling civil rights movements. Recently, these pockets of activism have taken IP reform issues to a wide audience, triggering sweeping civic action in the general population. The goal of this report is to identify and interrogate these pockets of activism, and to draw lessons from them. It is hoped that these lessons spread across the broadening global network of IP reform activists, ensuring a strong, sustainable and ultimately successful global movement for IP reform well into the future.

The relationship between human rights principles defined at the international level, and questions of justice, rights, and representation in Muslim contexts, is an issue of significant complexity. Within this broad debate – a defining feature of contemporary international relations – this thesis focuses on the extent to which the discourse of universal human rights provides women in the local Iranian context with a valuable point of reference to advance the ongoing struggle for women's empowerment. To address this question, the author begins broadly by questioning the commonly held view that human rights are a legacy of Western culture. An inquiry into the development of international standards in the second half of the twentieth century suggests that although Muslim actors were not the 'main players' in this process, nor were they passive spectators. Rather, members of Muslim communities – indeed Muslim women – have been active and impacting participants in the ongoing development of the human rights framework. The thesis then provides a more specific exploration of the strategic manoeuvres of the Iranian women's movement. Through an analysis of the shifts that have taken place within the women's movement over the course of Iran's reform and post-reform years (1997–2003, and 2004–present), the author argues that the two conventional approaches to advancing women's rights in Iran – Islamic feminism and secular feminism – carry significant practical limitations when carried out in mutual exclusivity. It appears, however, that women activists of both religious and secular orientations have recognised those limitations, and reformed their approaches accordingly. In the context of the Change for Equality Campaign, launched in August 2006, feminists of both secular and religious orientations are working together in a sustained and systematic attempt to advance mutual goals of non-discrimination. This paradigmatic shift, where practicality has trumped the maintenance of positional ideals, has taken place under a human rights banner. The aim of the Campaign, as defined by its members, is clear: to bring local laws on women into line with international standards on women's rights and gender equality. The Iranian political landscape has thus witnessed the birth of something unique: a non-ideological form of feminism, wherein both secular and religious oriented women have identified a common point of reference in the discourse of universal women's human rights. The author argues that this new form of feminism, expressed through the Change for Equality Campaign, is having a positive impact on both civil society and government, in a way that past approaches to advancing women's rights were unable to achieve.

Dissertation presented for the PhD Degree in Education Science – Curricular Theory and Science Teaching, by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia ; This work explores the urban experiences of marginal social lives through the mathematical epistemic regimes at the core of their survival strategies. It focuses in particular on the mathematical epistemic regimes of children in a street situation and seeks to recognize, understand, and validate forms of mathematics constructed and used outside of the established institutions of mathematical production. This work rests on the foundation of "The Mathematical Imagination",which draws together social constructionism (as it is developed in Sal Restivo's sociology of mathematics) and Ubiratan D'Ambrosio's conception of ethnomathematics. These two central ideas contribute to the objective here of connecting the production of formal mathematics and the praxis of informal mathematics, the mathematics produced at the margins where survival is more important than reflecting and reproducing professional cultures. The fact is that professional institutionalized mathematics within the contemporary mode of production has domesticated mathematical objects. Informal mathematics arises and is broadcast in the positions and voices at the margins of society and mathematics. The bringing together of marginal and non-marginal positions and voices results in and is an activist social practice. This practice represents the end of verbalism and the beginning of a situated knowledge that is engaged with our everyday lives, with our very being. Only through this form of practice, a practice that links the formal and the informal, can we realize the full power of mathematical knowledge as a social thing (in Durkheim's sense), a product of the collective consciousness that expresses collective realities and a category of knowledge present in every culture. This is as true for mathematics at the margins as it is for professional mathematics. The point of this work is to contribute to an emerging political manifesto of the marginal that demonstrates the social realities and social power of their mathematics. This is made possible through the application of social theory, and the practices of ethnography (especially in the traditions of action anthropology and the new ethnography) and history. These tools, melding science and action, help to reveal otherwise invisible and ignored cultural connections and social coherences, and in the end all is clarified and linked through a social construction guided by a concern for love and community. ; III Quadro Comunitário de Apoio, existing between European Social Fund and the national fund of MCTES, in the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

The legal, regulatory, administrative and policing structures of censorship and related forms of information suppression are well known and widely discussed. The much more insidious phenomenon of self-censorship is paid less attention, but it arguably prevents greater volumes of information, argument and comment from being openly expressed. Self-censorship by private individuals might only have consequences in terms of personal frustration, but selfcensorship by journalists and other commentators, political activists, and those involved in civil society campaigning is arguably socially damaging. Four main reasons why people censor themselves can be identified and these will be discussed in relation to four types of subject matter that are commonly seen to require self restraint. First, self-censorship is most likely where people succumb to the 'constraints of conformity' and allow a perception of the levels of expression that society will tolerate to stifle their individual responses. Second the pressures associated with the policies and political preferences of media owners can encourage commentators to tailor their views to fit those of their employers. Third, there is fear of the application of the law (such as measures on defamation, official secrets or incitement) to material that has been publicly communicated in some form. Fourth there is awareness of prior restraints that can be applied under some systems of law to communication that is being planned or prepared. Whilst it is still likely that committed people will speak out despite all or any of those pressures, in some subject areas it is easier for individuals to convince themselves that restraint is appropriate. The three areas of national security, social stability and protection of national culture all attract sentiments that can range from simple patriotism to xenophobia; can include socio/political conservatism; and emerge from variants of affection for a particular culture that stretch as far as cultural chauvinism. A fourth area that can be added to this list is a tolerance, based in cultural relativism, of ideas and practices that might well demand to be questioned. Recognising the origins of any impulse to self-censorship is the first step towards avoiding the suppression of necessary critiques before they gain utterance, and creating a more open discourse in society. If others suppress our freedom of expression it is bad, but if we allow ourselves to censor our own opinions it is worse.

In his seminal 1967 article, Access to the Press—A New First Amendment Right, Jerome Barron argued that speakers have a meaningful opportunity to convey their message only if given access to the mass media. Yet forty years later, the Internet features a bountiful, vibrant stew of individual expression, peer discussion, social networks, political organization, cultural commentary, and user-generated art. Given this emergence of Internet speech, Barron's call for a robust, egalitarian First Amendment may well be best met today not by a right of access to the mass media, but by meaningful opportunities to bypass the mass media. Our interest in rigorous debate among diverse and antagonistic voices might be best served not by requiring media giants to act as quasi-common carriers, but by insuring that peer communication, user-generated content, and new media will continue to level the playing field. The free speech concern is not so much that commercial mass media fail to air unorthodox views—the Internet after all is chockfull of dissident voices—but rather that media and telecommunication conglomerates might successfully bring the Internet to heel, drive out new media, and subject digital communication to their proprietary control. Hence, to a large extent, the fulcrum of ensuring real opportunities for expressive diversity has moved from calls for speakers' right of access to broadcast and print media to issues involving network neutrality and copyright. The bulk of scholarly and activist attention (among those who sympathize with Barron's proactively egalitarian vision of the First Amendment) has moved from how to regulate mass media to promote expressive diversity to how to ensure that individual speakers and new media have access to the conduits of digital communication and are able to build upon and disseminate the salient images, sounds, and texts that make effective communication and self-expression possible. This Article focuses on one part of that equation: copyright and its role in shaping public discourse in the digital arena. It focuses in particular on (1) incumbent mass media's untoward use of copyright as a vertical restraint to stifle the new media that provides platforms for peer speech, (2) copyright's continuing part in underwriting traditional media, a salutary function that stands in some tension with the media's use of copyright to suppress new media competition, and (3) copyright's potential for enabling powerful new media, like Google, to threaten expressive diversity in the digital age in much the same way that incumbent media has overwhelmingly dominated public discourse in the print and broadcast era.

The Communist Party based its attitude to religion on Marxism-Leninism as a scientific and theoretical framework. As a critical theory of the capitalist society Marxism examined the phenomenon of religion and religious feelings in civil society and designed a project of a future socialist society. One can say that Marxism looks at the phenomenon of religion from the angle of a class society, from a materialistic viewpoint and while using the historical research method. The source of religion is in man's alienation first from himself, then from other people and, finally, from society itself. Marxism surpasses the criticisms of religion dating back to the Enlightenment as well as the vulgar-marxist criticisms that associated religion and religious feeling with human ignorance and delusion. Marxism places religion into the historical framework including the social and economic setting which is changing, developing and thus producing or bringing about changes in religious consciousness. In their practice, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia or what was later the League of Communists of Yugoslavia had an attitude to religion and the church that was a mixture of some original Marxism but also, in much larger measure, of dogmatic, Leninist-Marxist and most often administrative –pragmatic stands which suited the then balance of political power in the state or at lower administrative levels. This attitude was also conditioned by the situation in the party, the state, Yugoslavia's international position, the situation in the church, etc. In this context, one can say that in the actual laws and regulations governing the legal status of the church and the issue of the religious rights and liberties of citizens the atheist approach predominated, i.e. the approach that was solely and exclusively determined in relation to God. This approach seems to have predominated due to the negative experience gained by the workers' movement in Yugoslavia between the two World Wars as well as during the course of the Second World War when the majority of church activists adopted a negative attitude to the National Liberation Movement (NLM). The process of atheization which was launched immediately following the end of the Second World War, in addition to formally playing a major role in establishing and giving legitimacy to the new social system of government, was also ongoing, in terms of its attitude to the churches, on at least two levels: 1) depoliticization of all religious communities; and 2) supression of the idea that religious attributes should be identified as national attributes in the established and traditional churches and religious communities (Serbian Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church, Islamic Religious Community).

The novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), written by Mary Shelley some twenty years after the French Revolution, has been subject to many theories and speculations since it was published. Many critics have wondered how it is possible that a girl of eighteen in the nineteenth century could write such a novel and what her inspiration could have been to come up with such a curious invention. Mary Shelley's monster and its master Victor Frankenstein are famous to the degree that, ironically, they overshadow their creator. To gain more insight into the novel and the idea behind it, it is interesting to consider to which extent Mary Shelley employed notions of enlightenment and revolutionary thought. Shelley's parents Godwin and Wollstonecraft participated in the so-called 'pamphlet war', a quarrel on paper between progressive and conservative writers and/or activists that was at its height during the 1790s. Edmund Burke, originally an Irishman and former supporter of the American Revolution, did not regard the French Revolution with quite the same amount of enthusiasm as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and other enlightened writers did. Political pamphlets advocating the rights of man began to appear everywhere in answer to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Writers of the Jacobin dissent reacted to Burke and other conservatives and they seized this as an opportunity to attack the established gentry. Godwin's most important political and philosophical work was written during this time entitled An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Even before Godwin, Wollstonecraft had published The Rights of Man (1790). During these years Wollstonecraft would publish her most famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which had great influence on authors moving in the same circles as she did. Godwin would later publish his political thriller Things As They Are; Or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which was an attempt to apply his abstract theories to a more realistic situation. Both these last pieces of writing will be used in analyzing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She did not write her novel out of a blank slate but instead based large parts of it on the works of her parents. The legacy of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and simultaneously the French Revolution can be found in many different concepts, positive and negative, which Mary Shelley incorporated into her novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.

Este texto se presentó como comunicación al II Congreso Internacional de Etnografía y Educación: Migraciones y Ciudadanías. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 5-8 Septiembre 2008 ; This paper deals with students' political culture in two preparatory schools in Guadalajara, Mexico where I carried out fieldwork in the year 2000. I focus on the precarious relationship between students and teachers and forms of contesting authority and displaying power that I observed among students in one school. In North American or Western European public schools as well as in public Mexican secondary schools the power relations between students and teachers and between the students and the administration are generally reported to be fixed, in the sense of the students being the weak party and the others powerful, despite attempts of resistance to this authoritarian structure by students (Willis 1975, 1981). Although this is seldom spelled out, this power difference is seen to result from a confluence of (assumed) differences in age, knowledge and structural positions in the school as organisation. As Eckert argued for high schools in the U.S.A., ―ultimate power in the hierarchy resides with the staff, who control the basic resources-materials, space, time, freedom of movement, and sponsorship-necessary to produce all activities and to achieve visibility‖ (Eckert 1989: 111). Sketching the organisation of preparatorias, I will show that the staff have much less control over the resources in this type of school, thus being in a structurally weaker position from the outset. Partly due to the heterogeneous student body, students have considerable leeway in negotiating their individual interests as well as their interests as a group. During my fieldwork, students and teachers were engaged in a tug of war, in yielding and wielding power (Villarreal 1994) which was at times more salient than at others. I will illustrate this with two examples of students displaying power and contesting authority, one of leaving lessons, which concern the large majority of students, the second of the occupation of school as a contestation of authority made public, concerning only a handful of student activists. In both examples it became evident that students used multiple ways of displaying power and contesting authority different to forms of resistance in European or American schools. These displays of power formed a vital part of the ―hidden curriculum‖ (Streissler 2005) and are best described by Foucault's notion of power, namely that it is ubiquitous, is produced and reproduced through constant social interaction, can be negotiated and contested. This cultural knowledge is vital for students' life in Mexican society at large.

2012 Summer. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Theorizing the relationship between sovereignty and nature has posed challenges to both scholars and activists. Some believe that sovereignty is a problematic institutional constraint that hampers the formulation of holistic solutions to ecological problems, while others contend that the norms, practices and institutions of sovereignty can be stretched in pursuit of ecological and social sustainability. Complicating this picture is the fact that the empirical contours of sovereignty have shifted of late, as the authority and control of the nation-state has been challenged by neoliberal globalization and the transboundary realities of many environmental challenges, creating a crisis of legitimacy that societal actors attempt to ameliorate in various ways. This dissertation begins from the observation that "nature" - the socially constructed ideal employed to capture the vast multiplicity of the non-human realm - is increasingly central to the process through which individuals, interest groups and social movements attempt to create more democratic, sustainable or ethical political communities and forms of governance. As environmental politics continue to gain traction within mainstream political discourses, environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike are inserting nature into struggles to reconfigure sovereignty toward a particular ecological and/or social ethos. In exploring this interaction, I ask: how do societal groups conceptualize and work to reconfigure the relationship between nature and sovereignty? And what are the social and ecological implications of the normative ideals that they attempt to institutionalize? In order to gain insight into these questions, I examine contemporary American debates over the environmental impacts of immigration. Discussions of the so-called "immigration problem" have been contentious for American greens, leading to significant division within environmentalist organizations, and surprising alliances with a variety of other societal interests. The individuals and organizations involved all attempt to challenge the status quo, but deploy vastly different conceptions of nature, political community and governance to do so. Turning to individuals and organizations who have taken public stances within this debate, I employ (1) textual analysis of websites and publications; (2) semi-structured interviews; and (3) content analysis, in considering the various discursive pathways through which environmental restrictionists and their opponents attempt to reconfigure sovereignty. Through this empirical analysis, I make the case that the discursive terrain on which the relationship between nature and sovereignty resides remains poorly understood - to the detriment of efforts to promote socially and ecologically inclusive polities.

This PhD thesis analyses the mechanisms and factors which have determined foreign policy making in Bulgaria since 1989. It contributes to the process of theoretical discussion concerning whether and how democratization affects foreign policy making. This discussion traces its academic origins to the beginning of the 20th century with theoretical debates among international relations scholars on the subject of whether liberal democratic regimes follow by nature qualitatively different foreign policies than authoritarian political regimes. Post-Cold War Bulgaria is a good case study for such a topic. A destabilizing factor in the Balkan region and politically isolated from both the immediate regional and the international environment for much of its modern history, Bulgaria has reversed this position since the end of the Cold War. It has engaged in a course of political integration into the regional and the international environment, following a foreign policy aimed at bringing stability and peace to the Balkan region. Sofia's qualitatively different foreign policy since 1989 has been interpreted as being the direct result of post-Cold War democratization. It is true that both the scope and the depth of democratization have been unprecedented in Bulgaria's modern history, but is it enough to explain the country's post-1989 foreign policy The thesis argues that such an interpretation is only partially true. If democratization refers to the establishment of political pluralism, then this process in itself is not enough to explain the country's post-1989 foreign policy. Bulgaria's political integration into international institutions such as the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has also exercised a large influence on Sofia's foreign policy making since the end of the Cold War. This is because Bulgaria's membership of the EU and NATO was conditional on Sofia's ability to adjust its foreign policy mechanisms for the political needs of Bulgarian integration into these organisations and to align the country's foreign policy decisions on a broad range of issues with the foreign policy decisions of the EU and NATO. The thesis employs a wide range of primary and of secondary sources from both the communist and post-communist periods. These were collected during a lengthy period of fieldwork in Bulgaria which included work in the archives of the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The primary sources include foreign policy documents, and personal interviews with a number of political activists, journalists and academics from the communist period and after.

Given the economic and social importance of agriculture in the early years of the Irish Free State, it is surprising that the development of organisations representing farmers has not received the attention it deserves from historians. While the issues of government agricultural policy and the land question have been extensively studied in the historiography, the autonomous response by farmers to agricultural policies and the detailed study of the farmers' organisations has simply been ignored in spite of the existence of a range of relevant primary sources. Farmers' organisations have only received cursory treatment in these studies; they have been presented as passive spectators, responding in a Pavlovian manner to outside events. The existing historiography has only studied farmers' organisations during periods when they impinged on national politics, epecially during the War of Independence and the Economic War. Therefore chronological gaps exist which has led to much misinterpretation of farmers' activities. This thesis will redress this imbalance by studying the formation and continuous development of farmers' organisations within the twenty-six county area and the reaction of farmers to changing government agricultural policies, over the period 1919 to 1936. The period under review entailed many attempts by farmers to form representative organisations and encompassed differing policy regimes. The thesis will open in 1919, when the first national organisation representing farmers, the Irish Farmers' Union, was formed. In 1922, the union established the Farmers' Party. By the mid- 1920's, a number of protectionist agricultural associations had been formed. While the Farmers' Party was eventually absorbed by Cumann na nGaedheal, local associations of independent farmers occupied the resultant vacuum and contested the 1932 election. These organisations formed the nucleus of a new national organisation; the National Farmers' and Ratepayers' League. The agricultural crisis caused by both the Great Depression and the Economic War facilitated the expansion of the league. The league formed a political party, the Centre Party, to contest the 1933 election. While the Centre Party was absorbed by the newly-formed Fine Gael, activists from the former farmer organisations led the campaign against the payment of annuities and rates. Many of them continued this campaign after 1934, when the Fine Gael leadership opposed the violent resistance to the collection of annuities. New farmer organisations were formed to co-ordinate this campaign which continued until 1936, the closing point of the thesis.

This paper is a reflection on the environment within which the struggle for gender justice is currently under way in the global arena. It also steps back to provide an analytical frame to explain the core of the tensions between gender justice and other elements of social/economic justice, and the strategic implications of the multiple sites in which gender relations operate. It draws from the experiences of feminists who engaged in analysis and advocacy while participating in the negotiations of the United Nations conferences of the 1990s. These conferences - on environment, human rights, population, social development, women, habitat, children, HIV/AIDS, small island states, food security, racism - and their five- and ten-year reviews have provided a unique opportunity for negotiating a progressive social agenda in a systematic and ongoing way. But even as such an agenda was being spelled out, the global economic policy terrain was almost entirely subordinated to neoliberal economic thinking dominated by the Washington Consensus. The interplay between these two sets of forces is our subject matter. The paper also comments on the implications for gender justice of the shift to a unipolar world order, and in particular, the movement from the neoliberal era to the neoconservative one. The work of feminist and other scholars and activists following the conferences of the 1990s showed clearly that security of livelihoods and an enabling economic environment are an important basis for moving forward to meet reproductive and sexual health needs through well-functioning health systems (Petchesky 2003). Yet, some of the very countries that were most vocal in their support for sexual and reproductive rights were also the most hard-nosed in South-North economic negotiations. These tensions came to the fore not only in the UN conferences themselves, especially Cairo and Beijing, but also in their 'plus five' reviews. Despite this, considerable advances were possible on reproductive and sexual health and rights during the 1990s because of the limited control over state power by religious fundamentalists. This scenario has undergone a major change in the neoconservative period with much stronger control over key levers of state power by religious fundamentalists on the one hand, and the rise of neoconservative political economy on the other. The first decade of this century has seen significant and tangible evidence of this in key conferences on HIV/Aids, Children, and Population, as well as in many other sites. This paper builds on previous analysis of the earlier phase to draw out implications for the current terrain in which feminists and allies are struggling to maintain hard-won gains and move forward.

Behind a high stonewall surrounding a rural farmhouse in Auvergne, Guy Debord, the ex‐Situationist theorist and activist, retreated. The grungy, cheap‐thrill Parisian urbanism of his youth was no more. Paris had died in his arms of a fatal illness that has seen off other great cities. Economic forces and planning initiatives had assassinated his rebel underworld, and culprits are still at large, still awaiting trial in the people's court. This essay embraces Debord the other side of the wall, dialoging with Pierre Mac Orlan, one of his favorite novelists. In so doing, we enter the phantasmal zone of the sentimental city, the city both real and make‐believe, defunct and yet‐to‐be. Mac Orlan's ideas about passive and active adventuring are explored here, to unlock the Pandora's box of Debord's urbanism. The essay approaches the capitalist city with a poetic gloss and reveals a realm richer and deeper than most social scientific urban research can grasp. Alongside Mac Orlan, Debord retraces his steps through urban ruins, and recaptures an everyday melancholy of backstreets and damaged people, of twilight nooks and crannies and shadowy bars. In Debord's sentimental city, it isn't so much the past that one regrets as the future.Derrière un haut mur de pierre entourant une ferme d'Auvergne, s'est retiré Guy Debord, l'ancien théoricien et militant situationniste. L'urbanisme parisien minable et décadent de sa jeunesse n'existait plus. Paris était mort dans ses bras d'une maladie désastreuse qui a emporté d'autres grandes villes. Forces économiques et initiatives d'aménagement ont assassiné son milieu rebelle et les coupables courent encore, dans l'attente d'un procès populaire. Cet essai voit Debord de l'autre côté du mur en train de dialoguer avec Pierre Mac Orlan, l'un de ses écrivains favoris. Ainsi, nous entrons dans l'illusion de la ville sentimentale, ville à la fois réelle et imaginaire, défunte et survivante. Les idées de Mac Orlan sur l'aventurier actif et passif y sont examinées afin d'ouvrir la boîte de Pandore de l'urbanisme selon Debord. L'approche de la ville capitaliste revêt un vernis poétique, révélant un univers plus riche et plus profond que ce qui peut être saisi par la plupart des recherches urbaines en sciences sociales. Aux côtés de Mac Orlan, Debord revient sur ses pas, traversant des ruines urbaines, retrouvant une mélancolie au quotidien des bas‐quartiers et d'une pègre abîmée, des coins et recoins obscurs et des bars mal éclairés. Dans la ville sentimentale de Debord, ce n'est pas tant le passé que l'on regrette, mais plutôt l'avenir.

The latter part of the 20th century has seen the emergence of radical black lesbian feminists and gay men who have begun to address the forces within black culture and the culture at large that have rendered their experiences and sensibilities silent. Theorizing from margin to center, individuals such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam, among others, have undertaken the hard work of creating language and theoretical paradigms, building literal communities, and excavating black history as a means of validating their humanity and longstanding contributions to black cultural formation. In light of this recent artistic and intellectual renaissance, the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference, held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from April 7-9, 2000, marked a moment of profound historical reflection and cultural recalibration. Building upon a legacy of work generated by black transgendered, lesbian, gay and bisexual writers and intellectuals, those black queers who assembled at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined to rethink and recalibrate the essential meanings of blackness and queerness from their own particular subject positions. Recalling DuBois's notion of the problematic black subject at the turn of the 20th century, this conference foregrounded black same-sexual identity politics, homosexual desire and transgressive, non-heterosexist bodies as essential axiomatic problems to be considered by a Black and Queer Studies committed to addressing the needs of the new millennium. The skillful and generous organizers of the conference, Professors E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, described the conference as one intent upon examining how black queer theorists, in particular, can critically intervene in the formation of Queer Studies as a disciplinary project. To clarify the particular nature of this intervention, the organizers outlined a set of postulatory questions that provided the infrastructure and focus of the conference's five panel discussions and keynote address: What are the implications of queer theory for the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people of color? Does queer as a term actually fulfill its promise of inclusivity as it is deployed in queer theory? How do those of us who teach queer theory effectively integrate the categories of race, class and materiality? How do we who are activists reconcile queer theory with political praxis? What is the impact of queer theory on the reception and analysis of black gay literature and cultural performance? ; African and African Diaspora Studies

BackgroundDuring the conservative period in Hungary between the two world wars, three unusual young women, Erzsébet Árvay, Judit Kárász, and Viola Tomori, joined a vanguard of youth who claimed to lead a new generation of Hungarians. As members of the Szeged Youth, they took up the cause of the peasantry of the Great Hungarian Plain, an isolated and neglected population presumed to bear "original Hungarian characteristics." Until recently, the relationship between gender and nationalism in studies on Eastern Europe has been neglected. Current developments in post-communist societies have sharpened our realization that historical periods are experienced differently and have different implications when seen from the vantage point of women rather than men. Intriguing questions are raised concerning these women's participation in the Szeged Youth Movement and their active role with the peasantry. In a society often characterized as restrictive and limiting, what was the experience of the young woman activist? Was she accepted by her peers as their intellectual equal? How did she feel about her final place in national affairs? These questions are elusive and complex, yet the example of the Szeged Youth Movement in the 1920s and 1930s provides a compelling study of the intersection of gender and national identity in the Hungarian context.During the interwar period in Hungary, the question of the fate of the Hungarian "nation"—which included the Hungarian population in the territories lost after World War I—took precedence over all others. This was true in respect to women's issues as well. The peace settlement was viewed as a national tragedy, reviving fears that the Hungarians or magyarsag would disappear, swallowed up by the surrounding Germanic and Slavic peoples. Virtually the whole population believed that the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which had reduced the Hungarian state to two-thirds of its former size, leaving 33.5% of the ethnic Hungarian inhabitants outside the borders, had been unjust and should be revised. The government under Prime Minister István Bethlen struggled to restore economic stability and to regain acceptance by the Western powers, on whom revision of the treaty depended. Certain moderate reforms were introduced, including the extension of the franchise to women and the broadening of educational opportunities. Yet, social insurance reforms for the urban populations were not extended to the masses of peasantry and rural proletariat, which still constituted over half of the population. In fact, the need to maintain the support of the large landowners precluded any extensive land reform, and Hungary remained a country of large estates.