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Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately–and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same way across space and time and popular education’s role in fostering this learning is simple. Unchecked, this leads to the reification of ‘critical’ theory and the reduction and flattening of emancipatory practices to methods or even predefined goals. This paper constructs a dialogue between the work of Choudry, Freire and other authors in both fields, aimed at both celebrating and problematising their contribution to learning from our struggles. By developing a conversation between them, we want to explore how their insights might be usefully integrated for contemporary social movements.

This article discusses the contributions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and later Marxists to understanding political participation. It argues that Marxism is fundamentally historical, so that rather than assuming a fixed and general institutional situation across states and periods the Marxist contribution can best be expressed as empirical questions about popular participation in specific contexts. The expectation is one of popular attempts to assert participation in decision-making, with institutional forms shaped by the outcome of such struggles between social movements from below and the agency of the powerful. This argument is illustrated with examples from the struggle for democracy in Europe since the 19th century, the changing nature of political participation in postcolonial India, “the world’s largest democracy”, and popular politics in the age of austerity.

This article argues that there is no single relationship between Japanese Buddhism and Ireland, but rather a series of changing relationships mediated by different world-system contexts between one island and another (peripheral and post-colonial) one: as ethnographic information, as cultural influence and as religious practice. The process has a long history, stretching back to the Irish reception of Jesuit and traveller’s accounts, and then made concrete by early intermediaries like Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo and Charles Pfoundes. WB Yeats helped to give Japanese Buddhism a significant place in Irish culture, notably in poetry. From the 1960s and 1970s Japanese Buddhists started to settle in Ireland and Japanese Buddhism began to be practiced; both are now an established part of the Irish religious landscape. The article sketches this history together with the present situation of Japanese Buddhism in Ireland.

“La Gira Zapatista es un verdadero regalo para nosotros […] Nos alegra tenerlos aquí, paseando con nosotros, haciéndonos preguntas, aprendiendo mutuamente de nuestras luchas”. Así cierra este libro su autor, al tiempo que le dice a lxs zapatistas: “gracias por venir”. En diálogo con ellos y con todxs lxs lectorxs de este texto.

Irish-themed reflection on the Zapatista Journey for Life to Europe. English-lang original of the Spanish-lang contribution to the 27-pamphlet series "Al Faro Zapatista", supporting the Journey

As researchers – historians, social scientists, journalists, legal experts, researchers on Irish culture -and survivors who have been forced to do our own research we reject the conclusions of the report of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes and in particular its claims about the evidence, which are deeply flawed.

The changing meanings of “social movement” sketch a history of the past quarter-millennium of popular struggles to change the world: how people have organized themselves and understood their activity. The term appeared in mid-nineteenth century Europe to grasp the French Revolution, the pan-European revolutions of 1848, and the rise of democratic, nationalist and socialist organizations. Contemporary elites were experiencing a disconcerting shift, mapped in the changing meanings of “society” away from the small world of those who counted, as in the capitalized usage of “Society”, when others (the vast majority) could be expected to “know their place” (Williams 1983). Earlier elites, then, could understand the human world purely in terms of political theory or economics. Our use of “society” to refer to all human beings and their interrelationships came into being as those others stepped out of “their place”, raising “the social question”.

As a social movements specialist I often find myself talking to nice, well-meaning students and professionals in the global North. Often they are (rightly) focussed on the terrifying reality of climate crisis and desperate to know what to do – but the strategies for change that are easy to find turn out to be very simplistic, shallow to the point of being trivial, and completely inadequate to the scale of the problem. In particular, many of the forms of action they are presented with ignore the history of what has actually worked in ecological movements – in their own countries in previous decades, or around the world at the moment. We are offered solutions that suit us, whether or not they actually have any track record of winning against the huge concentrations of power and wealth, and the entrenched cultural and social habits, that underpin carbon capitalism. When I can, I tell them some of the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP as a way of helping them start to think more seriously, in ways that might actually work. The Ogoni are one of the world’s most disadvantaged populations – so rural and remote from the centres of power that even their exact numbers are uncertain – and yet they were able to effectively resist Shell, which on recent figures is the world’s 18th largest economic entity, bigger than the economies of Mexico, Sweden or Russia, in times of a military dictatorship. That alone suggests that we should try to learn from them.

Shortly after Mme Blavatsky’s death in May 1891, a London correspondent for the New York Sun interviewed the Irishman Capt. Charles Pfoundes, who was running the first Buddhist mission in the west on behalf of the Jōdo Shinshū Kaigai Senkyō Kai (Buddhist Propagation Society). Pfoundes was a very public critic of the Theosophical Society (henceforth TS) and its claim to represent “esoteric Buddhism”, but Annie Besant’s transition from secularism to Theosophy posed severe, and ultimately successful, competition to Pfoundes’ mission

As activists in social movements, we live in the shadow of the “long 1968”, the wave of struggles that shook the world from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. This is as true in Prague or Derry, with their very different movement histories, as it is in Paris or Chicago, in Bologna or in Mexico City. How we challenge power today, what movements we ally with, how we think about possible futures and how we organise ourselves still depends on the decisive historical moment that was 1968. This article does not seek to celebrate (or condemn) 1968, but to understand a legacy which shapes our own movement landscapes – in order to be better able to think forward to another, more successful attempt at transformation.

An “Irish Buddhist” was often presented in old newspapers as an oxymoron, but our research (with Alicia Turner, Yoshinaga Shin’ichi and others) on the unexpectedly long history of Buddhism and Ireland has unearthed some fascinating dimensions in the broader study of religions and Ireland. Stepping beyond traditional discourses, we have found Irish Buddhists involved in Asian religious change, migrants bringing new religions to Ireland and people in Ireland rejecting the Catholic/Protestant binary. We have also found the first (1889) Buddhist mission to Europe (London) and a forgotten early 1900s Irish Buddhist challenge to colonial missionary Christianity in South & Southeast Asia. Our research has driven us to explore new methods – in particular using digital humanities to reconstruct forgotten figures and fostering developing scholarly networks to study translocal lives. This chapter situates our own discoveries among expanding new research initiatives on Ireland and religions, and highlights the significance of these research projects for the academic study of religions throughout the island of Ireland and beyond.

The world is on fire, with both fever and flame. After a few months of lockdown, things are erupting in new ways. The movement for Black Lives is demanding an end to anti-Black racism and conversations about abolishing the police are on late night television. In North America, a new world appears to be dawning, one that didn’t seem possible even a month ago. Meanwhile, in the new centre of global capitalism, the long-standing Hong Kong movement seems to be on the point of succumbing to a new wave of repression.

Media coverage and public discussion of the coronavirus crisis has focussed primarily on what states and governments do and what they should do about it: about the relationship between epidemiology and policies. Within the global North at least, public health is seen as being ultimately the responsibility of the state, despite neoliberal strategies aiming to dodge this responsibility and a legacy of hollowing out and privatising public health.

In recent years, many Mexican students have participated in two large-scale national mobilizations : #YoSoy132 in 2012 and the movement in support of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college in 2014. What happened to these students who committed themselves body and soul, for several months, to build another Mexico? To answer this question this dissertation proposes to study the activists' commitment during latency periods through the prism of the processes of subjectivation they experience. When sociologists are interested in what happens after a mobilization, they mostly study the reasons for demobilization, disengagement or entry into institutional politics. This thesis highlights the ins and outs of a third possibility and analyzes how, far from the spotlight, from institutional politics, and from organizations, students engage, act, think, and contribute to gradually changing the Mexico in which they live. By focusing on the subjectivity of the actors, Margot Achard not only shows that the activists' commitment continues after a large mobilization, but also seeks to understand how they live this commitment. Based on their experiences and encounters, students will shape and implement their own long-term activism during the latency period., Ces dernières années, les étudiants mexicains ont participé en masse à deux mobilisations nationales de grande ampleur : #YoSoy132 en 2012 et le mouvement de soutien à l’école normale rurale d’Ayotzinapa en 2014. Que sont devenus ces étudiants qui se sont engagés corps et âme, durant plusieurs mois, pour un autre Mexique ? Pour répondre à cette question cette thèse propose d’étudier l’engagement des activistes durant les périodes de latence par le prisme des processus de subjectivation qu’ils vivent. Quand les sociologues s’intéressent à ce qu’il se passe après une mobilisation, ils étudient majoritairement les ressorts de la démobilisation, du désengagement ou de l’entrée dans la politique institutionnelle. Cette thèse met en évidence les tenants et les aboutissants d’une troisième possibilité et analyse comment loin des projecteurs, de la politique institutionnelle, et des organisations, les étudiants s’engagent, agissent, (se) pensent, et contribuent à changer petit à petit le Mexique dans lequel ils vivent. En prenant le parti de se focaliser sur la subjectivité des acteurs, Margot Achard ne montre pas seulement que l’engagement des activistes se poursuit après une grande mobilisation, mais cherche également à comprendre comment ils vivent cet engagement. En partant de leurs expériences, de leur vécu et de leurs rencontres, les étudiants vont durant les périodes de latence façonner et mettre en œuvre leur propre activisme de long terme., (POLS - Sciences politiques et sociales) -- UCL, 2022