Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America - Softcover

Checker, Melissa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231128517 ISBN 13: 9780231128513

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Ten absorbing studies present activist groups across the country -- from transgender activists in New York City, to South Asian teenagers in Silicon Valley, to evangelical Christians and Palestinian Americans -- and examines a social change effort as it unfolds on the ground. Through their anthropological approach these portraits of American society suggest the inherent possibilities in identity-based organizing and offer crucial in-depth perspectives on such hotly debated topics as multiculturalism and the culture wars, the environment, racism, public education, Native American rights, and the Christian right.

About this title

About the Author

Melissa Checker is assistant professor of applied anthropology at the University of Memphis. Her research on environmental justice activism is the subject of an upcoming ethnography and several articles. She has been involved as an activist in the environmental justice movement. In her own discipline she endeavors to bring anthropological voices into public policy. Maggie Fishman is completing her doctoral dissertation on the contemporary arts education movement in New York City in the department of anthropology at New York University. She works evaluating arts-in-education programs in New York City public schools and has been active there in various causes, including the creation of a neighborhood school whose curriculum incorporates the tools of ethnography.

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231128517
• ISBN 13: 9780231128513
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276