During the Spring semester 2019, students on the module Globalisation and Resistance in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham-UK carried out independent research projects. In addition to writing a 4,000 word essay, they also composed shorter blog posts about their research projects for a wider audience. This post provides a brief introduction to the various posts, which are published on the blog Globalisation and Resistance.
Several of the student projects focused on current, left and progressive moments of resistance:
Ana Maria Cupes – One Thousand Definitions of Freedom: what Occupy teaches us about resistance.
Fotini Iacovou – Yellow Vests, a modern Anti-austerity crusade: What does the future hold?
Michelle Villamarin – Mega-mergers threaten our right to healthy and accessible foods!
Louis Verrall – The Bolivarian Revolution: a Popular Backlash against Neoliberalism.
Edward Gill – How cronycapitalism resulted in the 2011 Tunisian Revolution.
This also included a notable intervention on LGBT+ issues, which have become very much part of a left-progressive agenda:
Giovanni Schiazza – RuPaul’s Drag Race has (in some sense) fucked up Drag.
Unsurprisingly considering current struggles around climate change policies, environmental issues featured prominently too:
Henrik Årby – Fruck Off: Nottinghamshire people say no to shell gas.
Charles Hammond – ETHICS VS PROFITS: a German case study.
Kyle Scott Pirie – Deepwater Horizon, Nine Years Later.
Other students, however, provided a longer historical perspective, linking moments of globalisation and resistance back to imperialism and the Cold War:
Tochi Imo – Globalisation – An Imperial Initiative? The fight of the Ogoni people.
Mukunthen Muthuramalingam – Modernity’s curse: Excavating the historical roots of theSinhalese-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka.
Velislava Gateva – The Largest Capitalist Challenge.
Importantly, several students realised that resistance to globalisation is not necessarily a progressive enterprise, analysing popular protests linked to radical Islamic tendencies as well as right-wing politics:
Sophia Gaine – ISIS: a resistance to neoliberal hegemony.
Daniel Oyebamiji – Brexit and the Failure of Neo-Liberal Economics.
Maxwell Clarke – Globalisation, Resistance and Trump: contesting the political economy of globalrestructuring.
Last but not least, one student introduced the class to a highly unexpected resistance movement, an alliance of forces pushing for modernisation in Afghanistan:
Jumah Mohammadi – Afghanistan and the Enlightenment Movement: modernisation in troubled times.
Overall, these projects provide wide-ranging insights into the multiple ways of current political contestation around the world.
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