Bleeding women and theology from below

Dishonour is heaped upon dishonour for those who have been deprived of material conditions for life, often due to historical legacies of racialized inequality and oppression. Rather than villainizing those engaged in protests that produce disorder and defacement, identifying and articulating the sacredness of seemingly profane aspects of such contemporary movements is a singular and imperative task of Christian theology today. Through a close reading of the narrative of the bleeding woman in Mark’s Gospel, this essay argues that the South African student protest movement of 2015-2016, which included regular eruptions of destructive physical force, is an example of activism that represents the Gospel’s injunctions towards the securing of dignity by the marginalized unheard and unhelped. First, the essay will discuss the milieu of honour/shame which pervaded the first-century Palestinian context of the Gospels. Following this, the essay undertakes a close reading of the biblical narrative of the bleeding woman in Mark’s Gospel. It will be demonstrated that the woman’s intentional transgression of the social order resulted in her approbation by Jesus.

Max Planck Institute and Habilitation

The chapter describes the first job as a researcher in legal history in the newly founded Max-Planck-Institut for the History of European Private Law in Frankfurt, his work on the relationship between constitutional and private law in the nineteenth century, his Habilitation on the same subject, the novelty and importance of the subject. The year 1968, student protest movement, his involvement in two reform movements in connection with 1968, one concerning the Cusanuswerk (scholarship fund of the Catholic Church), the other the Max-Planck-Society.

Before Les Femmes s’entêtent

This chapter explores the connections between feminist thought and activism in the years following the end of the Second World War, and the feminism that emerged in the mid-1970s. Whereas the emergence of the 1970s French women’s movement is often linked to the student protest movement of May 1968, this chapter draws on the work of historians of French feminism to argue both that many of the women involved were of an earlier generation, and that earlier twentieth-century feminist activists and intellectuals, including Simone de Beauvoir, continued to be influential. Thus, while some French feminists in the 1970s presented their feminist activism as new and revolutionary, and rejected the mores and ideologies of earlier generations, there remained key lines of influence linking their approach - to issues such as women’s right to control their fertility- to earlier feminist campaigns and writings.

A Work Systems View of Unplanned Business Process Change: The Case of #FEESMUSTFALL at a South African University

Aim/Purpose: Improving or changing business processes is one of the most important roles for Information technologies functions. Yet, most organizations struggle with planned process change and even more with unplanned change. There is little support from research as the dynamics of planned process change is understudied and unplanned process change is seldom researched. Background: This paper describes the impact of unplanned business process change from a systems perspective. The #feesmustfall student protest movement, which began in 2015, and affected Universities throughout South Africa provides the context. Methodology: An interpretive abductive case study at a South African university used Steven Alter’s Work System framework to describe the unplanned business process change that occurred due to the #feesmustfall student protest movement. Contribution: Theoretically, this paper demonstrates the practical use of Alter’s work system framework to analyze unplanned business process change. Practically, it de-scribes and explains the impacts of the change which may be useful to executives or administrators responsible for operational systems within organizations. Findings: During unplanned business process change, change management, staff training, customizable technology and strategic fluidity and focus were found to be important. Unplanned business process change results in all elements of the work systems and its environment changing, even resulting in changed products and customer behavior. Impact on Society: If organizations are more aware of the impacts of unplanned process change they will be better equipped to control them. Future Research: Future action research studies on unplanned business process change could suggest actions for manager’s dealing with them.

Beauty and the Black Student Revolt

At the height of the Black Power movement, African American students, especially those attending predominantly white colleges and universities, demanded access to and inclusion in their institutions’ resources. Their demands included Black Studies and Black History programs, the end of racist practices by faculty and administrators, and more culturally sensitive programs that reflected their lived experiences. This essay examines how the Black Power movement sought to redefine the beauty aesthetic by exploring how African American students at Memphis State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s politicized the campus positions traditionally reserved for white students. In 1970 Maybelline Forbes was elected the first black homecoming queen at Memphis State. As athletic teams began to integrate during the 1960s and 1970s, black women struggled to penetrate the membership ranks of cheerleading squads, serve as homecoming queens, and join other spaces that excluded them. This essay demonstrates how these positions became contested spaces for the larger black student protest movement, thus offering a different perspective on how black activists engaged in protest on college campuses in the Black Power era.

Minding the Protest: Attitudes towards different forms of protest action in contemporary South Africa

This article focuses on providing new insights into the nature of public opinion about protest action in South Africa. Since the mid-2000s the country has experienced one of the world’s highest levels of popular protest and strike action, combined with the recent resurgence of an active student protest movement. Sociological research into these protests has suggested that they represent distinct phenomena and that local protests have assumed plural forms that cut across simple violent/non-violent and orderly/disorderly binary distinctions. Despite the rapid growth of literature on South African protests, surprisingly little is known about public opinion relating to various forms of protest. Consequently, this article aims to examine differences with regard to the acceptability, perceived effectiveness and participation in respect of three categories of protest action, namely orderly, disruptive and violent protests. The article uses data from a protest module included as part of the 2016 round of the South African Social Attitudes Survey, a nationally representative series conducted annually by the Human Sciences Research Council. Apart from determining the nature and extent of variation in opinion regarding the three types of protest action on aggregate, the article explores patterns of similarity and differentiation across societal groups, based on class, age, race, gender and geography. Finally, we analyse how and for whom perspectives on the three forms of protest have changed over the course of a generation by drawing on functionally equivalent data collected in 1995. The article concludes by reflecting on whether the evidence supports key hypotheses regarding the ‘rebellion of the poor’1 in the country.