Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties

Waves of Protest provides an invaluable source of analytical and factual insight into social movements since the nineteen sixties. This collection of essays exceeds in examining social movements through a cohesive paradigm of mobilization, organization, consciousness, strategy and tactics, and decline. The five parts serve to illuminate the interconnection that all social movements touch and further produce a map of how to tap into social consciousness. These essays range in political perspective and subject matter, yet each combines elements of political, social and cultural examination. This approach to dissecting the social movements for the reader allows the book to be just as valid for a history class as it is for a sociologist or a political science major yet the true power of this book exists for those who wish to bring about change in this world. By showing the vast connections of pre-existing social networks, analyzing the pro's and con's of social movement organizations power structures, to even the way a crisis crystallizes a movement, the collection of essays provide enough insight to learn from the past so new formes of protest may occur. Being published in an age of mass cultural homogenization, one must wonder why more attention was not paid to questioning what effective ways could spear head the next needed set of social waves. Though many prison doors have been broken open since the sixties the glass ceiling still holds much more subtle, but no less effective ways of confining all subordinate classes. Though there is no easy way to face the new movements needed to stop corporate media control, or educational inadequacy the only way to face the next series of problems is to learn from the past advances and mistakes and Waves of Protest excels at illuminating the necessary and critical factors of social movement since the sixties.