Spring/Summer 2005 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

POLITICAL SCIENCE / ECONOMICSCollective Action andRadicalism in BrazilWomen, Urban Housing, and Rural MovementsMichel Duquette, Maurilio Galdino, Charmain Levy,Bérengère Marques-Pereira, and Florence RaesSTUDIES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PUBLIC POLICYIn the past decade, Brazil has undergone a longseries of political changes, culminating in the recentelection of President Lula da Silva and his Workers’Party. These changes have come about through anunprecedented landslide of social activism. Thisbook is an examination of three recent movementswithin Brazil’s civil society: the women’s movement,the urban housing movement, and the landless peasantmovement. All three are representative of a moregeneral trend toward public protest and collectivelyindicate a shift in the dynamics of group identity inBrazil. The authors propose that the practices ofpower in Brazil are influenced by the expressions ofa civil society now reorganized into a social movementand mobilized within a ‘cycle of protest’ thathas attained the level of a political alternative.Michel Duquette is a professor in the Department ofPolitical Science at l’Université de Montréal.Maurilio Galdino is a training coordinator withEntraide Missionaire in Montreal.Charmain Levy is a programs officer with theCanadian Catholic Organization for Developmentand Peace.Bérengère Marques-Pereira is a professor with theCentre for Political Sociology and the director ofthe Centre for Latin American Studies atl’Université Libre de Bruxelles.Florence Raes is a program officer for the UnitedNations Development Fund for Women (Brazilianand Southern Cone Section) in Brasilia, Brazil.Denaturalizing EcologicalPoliticsAlienation from Nature from Rousseau to theFrankfurt School and BeyondAndrew BiroThe possibility of bringing the insights of modernpolitical theory to bear on the problems of humanecology has long been plagued by disagreementsover the category of nature itself. But withDenaturalizing Ecological Politics, Andrew Biro hasfound a way of rescuing environmentalism from theideological trap of naturalism.Biro develops an environmental political theorythat takes seriously both the materiality of the ecologicalcrises generated by industrial and post-industrialsociety and the anti-foundationalist critiques of‘nature’ developed in postmodern social theory. Heargues that the theoretical basis for ecological politicscan be better advanced through the lens of alienationfrom nature, sidestepping some of the pitfalls ofdebates over conceptions of nature itself.Biro traces the development of the concept ofalienation from nature through four modern politicalthinkers – Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, andMarcuse – each of whom are read as arguing thathuman beings are not biologically separate from therest of nature, but are nevertheless historically differentiatedfrom it through the self-conscious transformationof the natural environment. In so doing,Biro provides the starting point for a ‘denaturalized’rethinking of ecological politics.Andrew Biro is an assistant professor and CanadaResearch Chair in the Department of PoliticalScience at Acadia University.Approx. 240 pp / 6 x 9 / May 20053 tablesCloth ISBN 0-8020-3907-3 £32.00 $50.00 EApprox. 270 pp / 6 x 9 / May 2005Cloth ISBN 0-8020-8022-7 £32.00 $50.00 EPaper ISBN 0-8020-3794-1 £15.00 $24.95 C50