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I’m putting together my reading list for next year’s LSE course on activism and this week’s Guardian long read on Extinction Rebellion is going to be on it, even though it’s a bit UK-centric. It brilliantly pulls together a number of features of the rise of new social movements. Here are some extracts, but as ever, better to read the

Guest post from governance guru Graham Teskey. The aim of this blog is to suggest ways in which the ‘governance discourse’ (what a grand term!) is changing – indeed has already changed – as a result of Covid-19. I know that blogs are supposed to be discursive and informal. Recently our office was privileged to have a session with that

Best selling toy this summer – ht The New Yorker Been having fun browsing on what Matthew Spencer calls ‘the best simple guide to some of the principles of campaign strategy’. Example: ‘Do you really need to campaign? Campaigning can be fun but it’s often hard, dull, frustrating and unsuccessful. Even when it’s exciting, it’s a bit like Charlie Watt’s description of

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I owe Roman Krznaric – his brilliant 2008 paper How Change Happens, written as input to a long-forgotten Oxfam book called ‘From Poverty to Power’, got me thinking about change as a process, a thing in itself. Eight years later (my brain takes its time) I nicked his title for a book. In the intervening years, Roman has become a

One of my more enjoyable projects during lockdown has been finding out what my LSE colleagues do all day. We have recorded a series of 15 minute podcasts called ‘Zooming in With ….’ (catchy, eh?). Each interview is roughly divided up between their lives, an area of their research, and what insights it provides onto the current pandemic and response.

Really liked this diagram that came through my twitter feed recently, and the accompanying text, from Ricardo Levins Morales. ‘A moment of rebellion can give rise to sustained movement growth & expanding people power (Stonewall, Ferguson); peak & quickly fade away (2006 immigrant rights marches); or create a burst of growth followed by steady decline (response to assassinations of BPP

I’m still reeling from my first serious zoomarathon – 12 hours on zoom over 3 days (plus prep), with 50 researchers around the world from the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) consortium. I can report back that unfortunately, my mood swings are much the same as in conferences (but with added anxiety/grumpiness from struggling to manage combo of four

BLM continues to inspire reflection and rethinking: ‘Racism is very costly to its victims but also to racists—everyone is worse off in a double defeat. Ethnicism carries big opportunity costs and causes psychological damage (post-colonialism stress disorder.) Celestine Monga on the economy of prejudices. How (not) to write about global health Revisiting the Brixton struggle [i.e. the 1981 riots]. Interview

Guest post by Paul Knox-Clarke While Europe adjusts to a ‘new abnormal’, COVID-19 infection and mortality are still increasing in much of the rest of the world. The global response to this pandemic still has a long way to run, and it is too early to judge how effective emergency management and humanitarian actions have been, particularly in fragile and

Sabina Alkire presents the headlines from the latest Multi-Dimensional Poverty report Poverty is not just about income – dollars per day. It includes indicators on poor health, education, housing and more (see graphic). For the last ten years, we’ve been measuring this more nuanced multi-dimensional poverty – here’s what we’ve found. At least 1.3 billion out of 5.9 billion people