Smith ScholarWorks

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  Refugees on the Move: Crisis and Response in Turkey and Europe

  Erol Balkan and Zümray Kutla

  Refugees on the Move highlights and explores the profound complexities of the current refugee issue by focusing specifically on Syrian refugees in Turkey and other European countries and responses from the host countries involved. It examines the causes of the movement of refugee populations, the difficulties they face during their journeys, the daily challenges and obstacles they experience, and host governments’ attempts to manage and overcome the so-called “refugee crisis.”

  Source: Publisher

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  On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World

  Colin J. Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, George Lawson, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and Daniel P. Ritter

  A cutting-edge appraisal of revolution and its future. On Revolutions, co-authored by six prominent scholars of revolutions, reinvigorates revolutionary studies for the twenty-first century. Integrating insights from diverse fields--including civil resistance studies, international relations, social movements, and terrorism--they offer new ways of thinking about persistent problems in the study of revolution. This book outlines an approach that reaches beyond the common categorical distinctions. As the authors argue, revolutions are not just political or social, but they feature many types of change. Structure and agency are not mutually distinct; they are mutually reinforcing processes. Contention is not just violent or nonviolent, but it is usually a mix of both. Revolutions do not just succeed or fail, but they achieve and simultaneously fall short. And causal conditions are not just domestic or international, but instead, they are dependent on the interplay of each. Demonstrating the merits of this approach through a wide range of cases, the authors explore new opportunities for conceptual thinking about revolution, provide methodological advice, and engage with the ethical issues that exist at the nexus of scholarship and activism. Source: Publisher

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  Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities

  Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Scott LaCombe

  Digital information drives participation in politics, the economy, and society. Yet great disparities exist as to which communities have access to the internet. In 2017, only half of residents of formerly industrial Flint, Michigan, had broadband or satellite internet at home, while over 90 percent of those in thriving Sunnyvale, California, in Silicon Valley, were connected. More recently, Covid-19 laid bare these persistent digital divides in both urban and rural communities, illustrating that broadband use is a fundamental resource for the future of opportunity in communities.

  While previous studies have examined the impacts of broadband infrastructure, they have indicated little about the extent to which local populations can afford and use the technology. Moreover, there has been limited scientific evidence on how broadband adoption matters for collective benefits. Including new data on broadband subscriptions from 2000-2017, and comprehensive analysis for U.S. states, counties, metros, cities, and neighborhoods, Choosing the Future argues that broadband use in the population is a form of digital human capital that benefits communities as well as individuals.

  Broadband has a causal impact across all types of communities--for economic prosperity, growth, income, employment, and policy innovation. Yet there are urban neighborhoods and rural counties where as little as one-quarter of the population has a broadband subscription, even when mobile is included. As we build smart cities and communities, as economies and jobs continue to experience rapid change, and as more information and services migrate online, it is communities with widespread broadband use that will be best positioned for inclusive innovation, with the digital human capital to thrive. Source: Publisher

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  Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement

  Erin Pineda

  There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the normative standard for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. This narrative offers the civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement as a moral exemplar: a blueprint for activists who seek transformative change and racial justice within the bounds of democracy. Yet in this book, Erin R. Pineda shows how it more often functions as a disciplining example a means of scolding activists and quieting dissent. As Pineda argues, the familiar account of Civil Rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgments about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics. Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience "like a white state": taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence, Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account by adopting a different theoretical approach--one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing. Source: Publisher

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  Reimagining Women's Education: Jill Ker Conway, Smith College and the Ada Comstock Program

  Susan C. Bourque

  Junctures in Women's Leadership: Higher Education brings into sharp focus the unique attributes of women leaders in the academy and adds a new dimension of analysis to the field of women’s leadership studies. The research presented in this volume reveals not only theoretical factors of academic leadership, but also real time dynamics that give the reader deeper insights into the multiple stakeholders and situations that require nimble, relationship-based leadership, in addition to intellectual competency. Women leaders interviewed in this volume include Bernice Sandler, Juliet Villarreal García, and Johnnetta Betsch Cole.