The outbreak of the coronavirus has brought international scrutiny down on China’s political system. Again. A few commentators have applauded the efficiency of the Chinese Communist Party’s response, but most have zoomed in on its weaknesses. Some have even blamed the party itself for the outbreak, calling the disease a “Communist coronavirus” or “the Belt and Road Pandemic.”
The ZAD (zone à défendre, or “zone to defend”) in Western France is 4000 acres of wetland, farmland and forest that was originally intended to be built into an airport in 1965 but is now an autonomous territory occupied by 40 different collectives looking to reclaim the land. There are around 200 people living permanently on the zone, in addition to some 2,000 people coming and going.
Greg Jobin-Leeds, a long-time social activist, collaborated with AgitArte, a collective of artists and organizers, to capture the stories of today’s social movements and the activists behind their success with the release of When We Fight, We Win: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World.
Glowing softly in the West Texas desert night, artist Guadalupe Maravilla’s Mariposa Relámpago, was once an ordinary school bus but is now a richly decorated, mobile site for remembrance and healing. Like much of the artist’s work, this piece commemorates and confronts the artist’s journey to the United States as an unaccompanied, undocumented minor fleeing civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s.
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense.
On the occasion of the European Cultural Capital Graz 2003, WochenKlausur developed a year-long program of activities for older people with severe mental disabilities. The object was to offer them opportunities for a change of their daily routine inside the home.
In 2016 an eye-catching sparrow was spotted in Scotland. The bird had ingested feed pellets from a nearby salmon farm, turning its feathers pink. Cramped in underwater feedlots, farmed salmon have no access to the prey that colour their flesh in the wild. Instead, they are fed artificial colourants mixed with supplements, drugs, and hormones, causing them to relentlessly produce the additive-filled flesh that fills supermarket shelves.
Peggy Digg’s The Domestic Violence Milk Carton Project consisted of an image printed by Tuscan Dairy Farms on over one million milk cartons, which were distributed during January and February of 1992 throughout New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. This wide-reaching project sought to both raise awareness of domestic violence and distribute a helpline.
FloodNet was a conceptual artwork and a tool for online collective action.
Developed by the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), it took the form of a Java applet that allowed users to send useless requests or personalized messages to a remote web server in a coordinated fashion, thereby slowing it down and filling its error logs with words of protest and gibberish—a kind of virtual sit-in.
Cleve Jones's powerful vision for memorializing those lost to AIDS was realized in October 1987 in Washington D.C. It showcased the artistic contributions of people who'd lost loved ones to the virus from a number of US metropolitan centers. The quilt has continued to grow for the nearly 40 years since. By 1992, the AIDS Memorial Quilt included panels from every state and 28 countries.
El Sistema, also known as The National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestra and Choir, was established in Venezuela in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan educator, musician and activist. The music education program operates within the voluntary sector and is funded publicly.
CENTRO San Antonio's Art Everywhere Project will celebrate its 5th anniversary in May.
As of May 2024, the project had seen numerous artists from the city's urbancore decorate areas of the city with elaborate murals reflecting the city's history and the diversity of cultures in the city.
Fashion designers from L.A. to Milan are picking up their shears in solidarity to do their part to prevent the spread of COVID-19 to at-risk patients and primary care providers.
The Vivienne Foundation exists to honour, protect and continue the legacy of Vivienne's creativity and activism.
Since the start of her career in the 1970s, Vivienne was renowned not only for her fashion design, but also her activism. Vivienne always utilised her platform of prestige to make the world a better place.
José Bové, a sheep farmer/activist in Aveyron in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France, is a modern day Astérix, a mythical Gaul who drubbed foreign intruders centuries ago. In Bové's case, the intruder was McDonald's, the American fast food chain.
VALDOSTA, Ga. — On an October morning in 2018, Eleanor Holmes and her husband left home to run an errand and found two men inside their front gate. They introduced themselves as detectives from Orlando, Florida, and said they needed the couple’s help.
Godfrey Mwampembwa, popularly known as Gado, has been holding politicians accountable for nearly 30 years. Now, his concern has shifted to the coronavirus.
In a quiet office on the third floor of a building in Nairobi’s central business district, the cartoonist known by his pen name, Gado, was sketching a satire about the coronavirus.
We are a grassroots movement of Star Trek fans volunteering with non-partisan, pro-democracy groups nationwide.
Our team of thousands of "Starfleet officers" volunteer with our partner organizations to support voting rights, improve election transparency, and help elections administrators meet their staffing needs.
The first legislative victory of the Civil Rights era was obtained by hundreds of people going where they weren't invited. In 1961, Black and white Freedom Riders, well trained by SNCC in nonviolent action, rode Greyhound buses from Washington DC southwards primarily in order to wait, together, in waiting rooms that were still unconstitutionally segregated.
Filmmaker Michael Moore has called for a nationwide boycott of Walgreens after the pharmacy chain announced it would not sell abortion pills in 20 states.
n February, 20 Republican state attorneys general wrote to Walgreens Corp. threatening legal action if Walgreens provides the abortion pill, mifepristone, to consumers in their pharmacies across the U.S.
Shackles. Cotton. The Big House.
Americans tend to think of slavery in terms of chattel slavery. Plantation Slavery. Slavery where human beings are bought, sold, and owned. The kind outlawed in the United States by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Slavery as a relic of the 19th Century.
“Six of us lived, worked, slept in a 10-by-10 (foot) room without a bed, bathroom, or clean water,” Nasreen Sheikh remembers.
Empathy may be the cornerstone of any Global Justice movement, but how do we cultivate the conditions for empathy to thrive?
The wheelbarrow symbolises something universally useful, practical and pleasingly straightforward. A space to deliver things in an efficient and direct manner - no packaging and completely people powered.
When award-winning architect David Rockwell started spending time in playgrounds with his young children, he was disturbed by the lack of imagination and variation in the way kids interact with standardized playground equipment. He spent five years developing the Imagination Playground, seeking private-public partnerships to see it realized.
From October to December 2020, Chinese university students nationwide launched a viral movement to install “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in women’s restrooms—free, wall-mounted containers stocked with disposable pads on a take-one, replace-one basis. Nearly 250 campuses joined within weeks. Some sustained their boxes for over a year, while others saw them vanish after bureaucratic pushback, logistical hurdles, or dwindling volunteer resources.