Taiwan’s Sunflower Occupy Movement as a Transformative Resistance to the “China Factor”

This chapter focuses on the Sunflower Occupy Movement which broke out in March of 2014, shaking Taiwan's political landscape and its relations with China. The Sunflower Movement was a culmination of resistance to China's political influence and to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government's democratic careening. It arose from a changing political atmosphere and a wave of interconnected social protests in preceding years. Ultimately, it was a rare transformative event in which powerful collective action ruptures the structures confining a country. “Structures” here refers to two kinds of structure that constrain the space of individual and collective action but also induce action within this space: the structure of political rules, and that of ideology. This popular upsurge brought about tremendous impact, not merely transforming the political landscape of Taiwan but also diverting the political direction of the country from the KMT's pro-China policy, thus interrupting the course of a decade-long Chinese Communist Party (CCP)–KMT cooperation.

Tools of Navigation

Much qualitative education research has examined the intersectional identities of queer youth and Latina youth, in both cases highlighting how their identities converge with, collide with, or in other ways relate to their lives in schools. These studies have approached identity from a variety of lenses—borderlands, social practice and figured worlds, and others. They have also offered various positions on the extent to which the youth demonstrate agency and resistance. This chapter reports on a study that used meta-ethnography to synthesize the theoretical approaches, claims, and implications of the extant ethnographic work on Latina gender identities and sexualities. It finds that Latina high school and college students explored their identities in complex ways while questioning norms from both their own backgrounds and the dominant culture. At the same time, the authors represented their participants as having varying degrees of agency and commitments to collective, transformative resistance.

Engineering Resistors: Engineering Latina/o Students and Emerging Resistant Capital

This qualitative study examined how Latina/o engineering students, members of a student organization, used their emergent resistant capital in their academic trajectories. Their emergent resistant capital, as evident by three main themes, was characterized as a movement from conformist resistance toward transformative resistance. This study finds that emergent resistant capital enabled students to become engineering resistors by engaging in role modeling, doing community outreach, and resisting collectively. This study has research and policy implications for engineering programs aiming to serve Latina/o students.