https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/GENS5078?type=CORECourse Description:Social movements and social activism are critical to political engagement and social transformation. Traditional social science approaches to social movements and social change have tended to frame forms of collective resistance and protest primarily as either irrational, spontaneous reactions to oppression, or as rational expressions of reasoned dissent. In this course, we will challenge such views, employing an anthropological perspective which takes cultural practice as analytically central in order to see social movements instead as practical struggles over cultural meaning. We will first critically review the dominant theoretical frameworks which have shaped interpretations of social activism and social movements. We will then explore more recent theories of power, politics, and social change, in order to locate social movements within complex cultural structures of power, domination, and transformation. For each segment of the class, we will first examine a specific theoretical framework from which questions of social actions, movements, and change have been addressed. We will then go on to explore, through concrete ethnographic examples, the ways in which these perspectives enable - and foreclose - particular understandings of the nature of social movements, and of their implications.