In democratic societies schools play a large role in helping students learn the values and skills necessary for adult participation in a free and open society. This article is a case study of a group of students who started a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at a private American school in Mexico City. The students' struggle to form and keep their GSA,…

Traditional civil disobedience has usually combined deep spiritual beliefs with intense political ones. And while appreciating the differences in the two worlds--render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's--practitioners respected both. While sometimes willful and defiant and sometimes passive to the point of self-extinction, the…

The question of whether religious explanations about the origin of life should be taught alongside scientific accounts in compulsory science education has sparked controversy in several countries for decades. An important site for these controversies is media reporting. This article presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis…

This article is a reflective account of a researcher's journey whilst embarking on a study which was political in its intentions and participatory in its orientation. Learning from feminist writings, where researchers have shared stories and explored notions of insider/outside, academic/activist, the central argument of the article is the…

Often, the word activism conjures up the image of what the media and others call "radicals," such as inflamed Mexican American college students, for example, who are passionate and emotional, demanding an immediate end to racism on their college campus. Some castigate activist participants as immature and unsophisticated, whereas others…

This paper examines the role that cultural identity and grassroots activism and community development have played in the creation, maintenance and expansion of Louisiana French immersion education. Although linguists tend to portray the extinction of endangered minority languages as inevitable, research on the effects of minority language…

This article profiles Grace Abbott, one of the earlier 20th century American women leaders in Progressivism. Abbott's heritage influenced her lifetime commitment to social improvement. She was born on November 17, 1878 in Grand Island, Nebraska into a family of activists. Her Quaker mother, Elizabeth Griffin Abbott, came from an abolitionist…

Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, the liberating and democratic potential of digital information is counteracted by the concentration of media ownership, as well as by policy, legislation, and the development of proprietary forms of technology. The notion of "intellectual property" produces artificial scarcity…

Zandi Zwane is a media activist and educator living and working in Cape Town, South Africa. She identifies herself as Black, Nguni, lesbian, female--and "Azanian: a term that was created in pre-colonial times by the members of the Black Consciousness Movement in resistance to colonialism." In this interview, Zwane explores the…

The Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development is a Washington, D.C.-based organization engaged in programming, research, and policy development related to youth civic engagement. Its mission is to unleash the potential of youth, adults, organizations, and communities to engage together in creating a just and equitable society. Strong…

In this article, the author shares his experience being the "chair" of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He also shares how this department proved to be an "ordinary" department at an "ordinary" liberal arts college. However, to conclude…

In the Fall of 2003, the Office of Human Relations Programs (OHRP), the campus-wide equity compliance and diversity education arm of the Office of the President at the University of Maryland, College Park, created, developed, and began implementation of the three-year "Social Justice from Classroom to Community" (SJCC) project through…

It is no secret that public education is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. When one of the nation's top syndicated talk-radio hosts repeatedly equates public schooling with child abuse and no outcry ensues, denial is no longer a viable option. Facts don't matter when the goal is to entertain rather than to inform.…

Although it is obligatory to mark the anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education," why it deserves to be commemorated is not necessarily obvious at a distance of fifty years. In this article, the author discusses this issue in the light of Richard Kluger's remarkable book--"Simple Justice." He states that, today the widespread existence of…

Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline's reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification…