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This book chronicles the formation of the world’s first domestic worker movement, from the grassroots to global activism. It tells the story of individual women who not only struggled to gain rights in their own countries but mobilized transnationally, eventually taking their fight to the global policymaking arena. The story emerges from research the author conducted over the course of five years, often working alongside this formative global movement. It takes us to Geneva, Switzerland, site of the International Labour Organization, where the first policy protections for domestic workers were negotiated, and traces the key moments leading to this “happy ending for human rights.” It profiles the individuals who came together across a range of contexts to give voice to this long-overlooked labor sector. While the focus here is on domestic workers, the book also examines the model of civil society organizing that was crucial to this struggle. This model is key to an understanding of how a group with so few resources was able to organize and act within the world’s most powerful international structures to shine a light on the wider global plights of migrants, women, and informal workers. The story is one of hope that social justice change is possible, as workers formerly excluded from basic human rights and protections, who had been considered “invisible” and “victimized,” stood upon a global stage to claim their rights, recognition, and dignity long overdue.

This book analyzes diverse representations of environmental moral engagement in contemporary mediated popular culture. It identifies and explores intertwining, co-constitutive, yet contrary stories of what the author terms “ecopiety” and “consumopiety” as they flow across multiple media platforms. The way these stories compete and conflict, vying for space as contested narratives in the public imagination, constitutes a central inquiry of the book. Drawing together theoretical insights from cultural studies, media studies, environmental humanities, and religious studies, the book offers a critical reading of primary source data drawn from such areas as the marketing of green consumer products, “greenwashed” corporate advertising, environmental mobile device applications, eco-themed reality television, the marketing of eco-funerals, Internet sharing of environmental tattoos, “green” fashion guides, and the media strategies of green hiphop activism. Taylor makes the case that a detailed, multichannel, cross-platform approach to cultural analysis is critical to understanding the kind of important “work” taking place as mediated popular culture plays an integral role in the “greening” of American moral sensibilities. Ecopiety delves into the complex and contested processes of remaking our world and rescripting the future in the digital age—a time when storytelling processes themselves are shaping and being shaped by new media outlets and digital sharing technologies.

Working on behalf of women of color, the movement for reproductive justice incorporates intersectionality and human rights to advocate for women’s right to bear children free from coercion or abuse, terminate their pregnancies without obstacles or judgment, and raise their children in healthy environments as well as the right to bodily autonomy and gender self-identification. The movement for reproductive justice takes health advocacy further by pushing for women’s human right to access health care with dignity and to express their full selves, including their spiritual beliefs, as well as policies that address social inequalities and lead to greater wellness in communities of color. The evidence is drawn from ethnographic research with thirteen organizations located throughout the United States. The overall argument is that the organizations discussed here provide a compelling model for negotiating across differences within constituencies. This movement has built a repertoire of “ready-to-work skills” or methodology that includes cross-sector coalition building, storytelling in safer spaces, and strengths-based messaging. In the ongoing political clashes in which the war on women’s reproductive rights and targeting of immigrants seem particularly egregious and there are widespread questions about whether “the resistance” can maintain its cohesion, the movement for reproductive justice offers a model for multiscalar politics in opposition to conservative agendas and the disparagement of specific social categories. Using grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocacy, this movement also offers visions of the strength, resiliency, and dignity of people of color.

Undocumented immigrants in the United States who take part in social movement activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. Despite this risk, undocumented immigrant youth have been at the forefront of the national movement for immigrant rights. In their activism these youth have leveraged their identities as immigrants but also as queer individuals, people of color, and women. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Asian undocumented, undocumented and queer (undocuqueer), and formerly undocumented activists, Organizing While Undocumented examines these activists’ cultivation of and strategic use of an intersectional movement identity. Through the development of the Identity Mobilization Model, the book highlights three critical strategies that undocumented immigrant youth have utilized when deploying an intersectional movement identity. Ultimately, this book argues that undocumented immigrant youth have challenged the notion that their immigration status wholly defines their lived experiences and, in the process, emphasized the importance of their multiple social identities. This emphasis has in turn allowed undocumented activists to connect their struggle to a broader set of social justice struggles taking place in the world today.

Pride Parades tells the story of Pride in two parts. In Part I, the author explores how gays and lesbians established the event in the early 1970s as a parade to affirm gay identities. Situating this story at its beginning in mid-1970, the book outlines the scene where approximately 5,000 gays and lesbians (and surely a handful of straight allies) marched through the streets of Manhattan, West Hollywood, and downtown Chicago in the first ever Pride events. The events were a curious mix of protest march and parade - more festive than a typical angry march but with more contention than a typical parade – and were the largest ever public gatherings of out gays and lesbians in history; moreover, these marches were so successful that immediately afterward participants started planning for the following year, thus heralding the beginning of the colorful tradition of Pride. In Part II, the text leaps to 2010 and examines contemporary Pride parades. Pride today communicates messages about queer sexuality and gender that run counter to the heteronormative code of meaning that privileges heterosexuality as natural and moral.