A full-length analysis of social movements from a cultural perspective. This work considers the different approaches to culture, how movements are affected by their cultural environment and internal cultures within the movements themselves.

This collection of essays by cultural critic Carol Becker plumbs particular areas of controversy to understand what information these "zones of contention" might yield about the multifarious culture wars taking place within American society today. In the process she addresses the place of art and artists in society, the difficulties facing women in the workplace, why male bonding exists, why women experience anxiety in relationship to creative endeavors, and why artists are misunderstood within American society. She positions art and artists, as well as institutional dynamics within a philosophical framework.

"The authors challenge currently dominant approaches to migration, and offer important ways to move between the individual experience and the structure of the world system."---Alan Smart, University of Calgary --

This open access book investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and local identity formation processes and discusses the social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine via cultural lenses from an entangled perspective. The 17 chapters reflect diverse research interests, from case studies of individual archives to chapters that question the concept of cultural diplomacy more generally. They illustrate the diversity of scholarship that enables a broad-based view of how cultural diplomacy functioned during the interwar period, but also the ways in which its meanings have changed. The book considers British Mandate Palestine as an internationalised node within a transnational framework to understand how the complexity of cultural interactions and agencies engaged to produce new modes of modernity. Karène Sanchez Summerer is Associate Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her research considers the European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860-1948) in Palestine. She is the PI of the research project (2017-2022), 'CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948)' (project funded by The Netherlands National Research Agency, NWO). She is the co-editor of the series 'Languages and Culture in History' with W. Frijhoff, Amsterdam University Press. She is part of the College of Experts: ESF European Science Foundation (2018-2021). Sary Zananiri is an artist and cultural historian.He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the NWO funded project 'CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948)' at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Despite extensive theoretical debates over the utility of "political opportunities" as an explanation for the rise and success of social movements, there have been surprisingly few serious empirical tests. Contention in Context provides the most extensive effort to date to test the model, analyzing a range of important cases of revolutions and protest movements to identify the role of political opportunities in the rise of political contention. With evidence from more than fifty cases, this book explores the role of the state in protest, the frequent overemphasis on political opportunities in recent research, and the extent to which opportunity models ignore the cultural and emotional triggers for collective action. By examining new directions in the study of protest and contention, this book shows that although political opportunities can help explain the emergence of certain kinds of movements, a new strategic language can ultimately tell us far more.