Spaces for Difference: An Interdisciplinary Journal

This article examines the role of radio in advancing activist participation in a Mexican social movement, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). I show how APPO radio stations elicited shared emotional connections and experiences for movement activists and potential allies within the community of radio listeners. The radio served as a backbone for the construction and negotiation of a collective identity. Using the 2006 Oaxacan uprising as a case study, I analyze the importance of radio in generating the tools necessary for mobilization, collective identity, and democratic participation.

This collaboration between a Vancouver poet and a Montreal-Boston visual artist is meant to introduce a poetic-artistic perspective to academic terrain.

The poems, written in spare diction, and the delicate nature of the forest, juxtapose the tensions between the industrialized academy and creativity. The goal of the work is to

re-connect poet/artist with the world, in a newly re-imagined place, a creative, thriving, organic, collaborative place.

The work describes the places (dreams, parks, ponds) where academia and nature collide. Here, the academy meets the sudden, startling signals of nature (birds, owls, mountains). In the final poem, “Light,” both poem and visual representation bend to the ground. The piece thus becomes a meditation on survival, brought by the grace and gentleness of the earth itself.

This artistic collaboration is ultimately meant to re-humanize and expand the narrow definitions of our workplace institutions through the interruption of poet/artist as forces of nature themselves.

Angela McRobbie explores the cultural forces that have negated feminism as a social movement by examining the post-feminist cultural environment in, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. This book is not an empirical work, but rather a survey of changes in popular culture. McRobbie analyzes the ways in which popular culture is used to dismantle feminist gains. She is particularly interested in the future of feminism outside of academic institutions. This review highlights the major arguments in the text and concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of this book in academic courses and further study.