ABSTRACT
COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL CHANGE EFFORTS SEEM ALL TOO LIMITED WHEN PLACED up against the structures of inequality that shape the wider political and economic context. Global processes of economic restructuring are undermining unionization, job security, sustainability of communities and the environment, and social supports, especially those provided through the so-called welfare state.1
However, political activism designed to challenge the expansion of global inequality has generated worldwide attention, as evident in protests against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Toronto, and many non-Western locales that receive little if any media attention. Furthermore, community actions on behalf of progressive agendas remain salient features of local encounters with the state, with corporations, with employers, and with racist and sexist forces pervading many spheres of social life. This book seeks to make visible the relationship between local organizing efforts and global economic restructuring as well to highlight the contradictions of transnational feminist politics.
