Laurence Cox
Biographic Data
| ID | 3673712 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurence Cox |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurence |
| FAMILY NAME | Cox |
| SIGNATURE | COX L |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Ireland, Maynooth |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8464-0464 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements
This cutting-edge and authoritative Handbook covers a broad spectrum of social movement research methodologies, offering expert analysis and detailed accounts of the ways by which research can effectively be carried out on social movements and popular protests. Addressing practice-oriented questions, this Handbook engages with both theoretical and political considerations, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research.
Why Do European Buddhists Meditate? The Practical Problem of Inventing Global Buddhism
Globalising “Buddhism” beyond its pre-colonial homelands was a complex practical challenge. Actors seeking to bring Buddhism to new audiences in very different cultures met with failure far more often than success until recent decades. Modern-era Buddhist missionaries to Europe had to experiment, selecting elements of Asian Buddhism that could theoretically be transmitted – ordinations, preaching, textual knowledge, rituals etc. – and attempt to …
Thinking social movement learning, again: Choudry, Freire and the conversation between popular education and social movements
Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes.Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequatelyand vice versa.This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same wa…
Japanese Buddhism and Ireland
This article argues that there is no single relationship between Japanese Buddhism and Ireland. Rather, there is a series of changing relationships mediated by different world-system contexts between one island and another (peripheral and post-colonial) one: as ethnographic information, as cultural influence and as religious practice. The process of building such relationships has a long history, stretching back to the Irish reception of both Jes…
Sustainable Activism
In societies based on economic exploitation, unequal power and cultural hierarchies, the struggle to survive as a fully human subject is also a struggle against existing social relationships. Sustainable activism is a radical achievement. To become, and remain, a member of a community or social movement whose struggle actively challenges dominant relations of power is radical in the sense of durable participation in the attempt to transform these…
Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice
Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be "theory from above." This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means sta…
Voices of 1968: Documents from the Global North
Muslims in Ireland: Past and Present
Muslims in Ireland is a landmark study of its topic. With the Republic of Ireland’s transition from a country of emigration to one of immigration from the mid-1990s onwards, it is also one of the f
Scholarship and Activism: A Social Movements Perspective
This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take…
Silence Would Be Treason: Last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer, television producer, environmental activist, and winner of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize, was President of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and led a nonviolent campaign against the environmental degradation of land and waters by the operations of the multinational petroleum industry, especially Royal Dutch Shell. He was an outspoken critic of the Nigeria…
Movements Making Knowledge: A New Wave of Inspiration for Sociology
Sociology's marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors' interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing discussions of socia…
Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-Austerity Protest
What Would a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Look Like?
A Marxist Theory of Social Movements
Marxism and Social Movements: An Introduction
Marxism is a body of theory crafted for social movements. This chapter suggests that the language of ‘class struggle’ translated into a language of ‘social movement’ with a Marxist accent. While contemporary social movement theories rightly stress the networked character of social movements, they pay less attention to their heterogeneity and internal debates. The book includes theoretical accounts of the relationship between Marxism and social mo…
Eppur Si Muove: Thinking ‘The Social Movement’
Social movement studies has become a minor, but familiar, field of academia, routinely included in general textbooks. This paper steps back from this situation to explore a wide history of ideas and an alternative, usage of phrase 'social movement', grounded in a broader awareness of historical possibility and a more dialectical sense of social development than contemporary 'social movement studies' usage. It then explores one way this figure of …
Marxism and Social Movements
Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberali…
A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer European Buddhists and Globalizing Asian Networks 1860–1960
The period from the later nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth \ncenturies—roughly between the Indian Revolt of 1857 and the withdrawal of most \nEuropean powers from direct rule in Asia—was one of immense change across \nSoutheast Asia and the Buddhist world. This century saw the emergence of the \nelements that we now take to constitute modern Buddhism, or the multiple \nmodern Buddhisms: the rise of the laity as practitioners and orga…
Rethinking Early Western Buddhists: Beachcombers, ‘Going Native’ and Dissident Orientalism
Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in Asia—needed by empire but prone to defect from elite standards of behaviour designed to maintain imperial and racial power. ‘Going native’, exemplified by the European bhikkhu, highlights the difficulties faced by e…
Powercube: Understanding power for social change
Revolution in the Air: Images of Winning in the Irish Anti-Capitalist Movement
This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian (‘Grassroots’) wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in a very intensive form of political activity, and asks how activists understand winning. It finds substantial congruence between organisational practice and long-term goals, noting social justice and participatory…
Current Debates: New Religion(s) in Ireland ‘Alternative Spiritualities, New Religious Movements and the New Age in Ireland’ Conference Report, NUI Maynooth, 30–31 October 2009
Recent decades have seen a sea change in the study of religion in Ireland. Numerically dominated by theology until very recently – to the extent that Ireland is one of only two European countries without an association for the non-confessional study of religion – the quantitative decline in academic theology, the generational change of staff, the merging of seminaries and the increasingly lay character of their students are all pointing towards a…
The Politics of Buddhist Revival: U Dhammaloka as Social Movement Organiser
This article explores some important aspects of U Dhammaloka's Buddhism, drawing in particular on the work of his Rangoon-based Buddhist Tract Society between 1907 and 1910. It explores his work – in the Society and more generally - as in effect a social movement organiser within the Buddhist Revival, looking at his funders, publishers, printers, translators and distributors as well as those who wrote about him, laid down their hair for him to wa…
Beachcombing, Going Native and Freethinking: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics
The article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘U Dhammaloka, “The Irish Buddhist”: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics’. Traditional accounts of pioneer Western Buddhist monastics begin with the 1899 ordination of H. Gordon Douglas (Aśoka), and highlight gentleman scholars writing for a European audience. They consign to obscurity a pre-existing world of Western Buddhist monastic…
Objections of a Sentimental Character: The Subjective Dimensions of Foreskin Loss
Building utopia here and now
While a powerful strand of both environmental and religious utopianism has been to construct purpose-built communities â somewhere elseâ , usually in rural settings, a combination of lack of resources and doubts about the strategic usefulness of such projects has led most working-class or left utopias to have a different focus. Typically, these latter grew within the struggle to meet everyday needs, in the course of political campaigns or at the …
Movements Making Knowledge: A New Wave of Inspiration for Sociology
Sociology's marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors' interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing discussions of socia…
Social Movements Research and the ‘Movement of Movements’: Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation
This article explores the state of research on the ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and…
Scholarship and Activism: A Social Movements Perspective
This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take…
Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-Austerity Protest
Beachcombing, Going Native and Freethinking: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics
The article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘U Dhammaloka, “The Irish Buddhist”: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics’. Traditional accounts of pioneer Western Buddhist monastics begin with the 1899 ordination of H. Gordon Douglas (Aśoka), and highlight gentleman scholars writing for a European audience. They consign to obscurity a pre-existing world of Western Buddhist monastic…
Thinking social movement learning, again: Choudry, Freire and the conversation between popular education and social movements
Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes.Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequatelyand vice versa.This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same wa…
Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice
Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be "theory from above." This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means sta…
Powercube: Understanding power for social change
Objections of a Sentimental Character: The Subjective Dimensions of Foreskin Loss
Barbarian Resistance and Rebel Alliances: Social Movements and Empire
Empire is curious and challenging book. Although it sets out to be latter-day Communist Manifesto, it lacks the concrete aesthetic, the urgent pace of argument, and the practical cutting edge of the latter. There are sound material reasons for this, some of which its authors would doubtless acknowledge: it is not, after all, the product of the needs and temperature of radical organisation, written in the midst of great revolutionary wave. What Em…
Barbarian Resistance and Rebel Alliances: Social Movements and Empire
Empire is curious and challenging book. Although it sets out to be latter-day Communist Manifesto, it lacks the concrete aesthetic, the urgent pace of argument, and the practical cutting edge of the latter. There are sound material reasons for this, some of which its authors would doubtless acknowledge: it is not, after all, the product of the needs and temperature of radical organisation, written in the midst of great revolutionary wave. What Em…
Building utopia here and now
While a powerful strand of both environmental and religious utopianism has been to construct purpose-built communities â somewhere elseâ , usually in rural settings, a combination of lack of resources and doubts about the strategic usefulness of such projects has led most working-class or left utopias to have a different focus. Typically, these latter grew within the struggle to meet everyday needs, in the course of political campaigns or at the …
Social Movements Research and the ‘Movement of Movements’: Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation
This article explores the state of research on the ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and…
Objections of a Sentimental Character: The Subjective Dimensions of Foreskin Loss
Revolution in the Air: Images of Winning in the Irish Anti-Capitalist Movement
This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian (‘Grassroots’) wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in a very intensive form of political activity, and asks how activists understand winning. It finds substantial congruence between organisational practice and long-term goals, noting social justice and participatory…
Current Debates: New Religion(s) in Ireland ‘Alternative Spiritualities, New Religious Movements and the New Age in Ireland’ Conference Report, NUI Maynooth, 30–31 October 2009
Recent decades have seen a sea change in the study of religion in Ireland. Numerically dominated by theology until very recently – to the extent that Ireland is one of only two European countries without an association for the non-confessional study of religion – the quantitative decline in academic theology, the generational change of staff, the merging of seminaries and the increasingly lay character of their students are all pointing towards a…
The Politics of Buddhist Revival: U Dhammaloka as Social Movement Organiser
This article explores some important aspects of U Dhammaloka's Buddhism, drawing in particular on the work of his Rangoon-based Buddhist Tract Society between 1907 and 1910. It explores his work – in the Society and more generally - as in effect a social movement organiser within the Buddhist Revival, looking at his funders, publishers, printers, translators and distributors as well as those who wrote about him, laid down their hair for him to wa…
Beachcombing, Going Native and Freethinking: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics
The article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘U Dhammaloka, “The Irish Buddhist”: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics’. Traditional accounts of pioneer Western Buddhist monastics begin with the 1899 ordination of H. Gordon Douglas (Aśoka), and highlight gentleman scholars writing for a European audience. They consign to obscurity a pre-existing world of Western Buddhist monastic…
Powercube: Understanding power for social change
Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-Austerity Protest
What Would a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Look Like?
A Marxist Theory of Social Movements
Marxism and Social Movements: An Introduction
Marxism is a body of theory crafted for social movements. This chapter suggests that the language of ‘class struggle’ translated into a language of ‘social movement’ with a Marxist accent. While contemporary social movement theories rightly stress the networked character of social movements, they pay less attention to their heterogeneity and internal debates. The book includes theoretical accounts of the relationship between Marxism and social mo…
Eppur Si Muove: Thinking ‘The Social Movement’
Social movement studies has become a minor, but familiar, field of academia, routinely included in general textbooks. This paper steps back from this situation to explore a wide history of ideas and an alternative, usage of phrase 'social movement', grounded in a broader awareness of historical possibility and a more dialectical sense of social development than contemporary 'social movement studies' usage. It then explores one way this figure of …
Marxism and Social Movements
Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberali…
A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer European Buddhists and Globalizing Asian Networks 1860–1960
The period from the later nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth \ncenturies—roughly between the Indian Revolt of 1857 and the withdrawal of most \nEuropean powers from direct rule in Asia—was one of immense change across \nSoutheast Asia and the Buddhist world. This century saw the emergence of the \nelements that we now take to constitute modern Buddhism, or the multiple \nmodern Buddhisms: the rise of the laity as practitioners and orga…
Rethinking Early Western Buddhists: Beachcombers, ‘Going Native’ and Dissident Orientalism
Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in Asia—needed by empire but prone to defect from elite standards of behaviour designed to maintain imperial and racial power. ‘Going native’, exemplified by the European bhikkhu, highlights the difficulties faced by e…
Silence Would Be Treason: Last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer, television producer, environmental activist, and winner of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize, was President of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and led a nonviolent campaign against the environmental degradation of land and waters by the operations of the multinational petroleum industry, especially Royal Dutch Shell. He was an outspoken critic of the Nigeria…
Movements Making Knowledge: A New Wave of Inspiration for Sociology
Sociology's marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors' interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing discussions of socia…
Scholarship and Activism: A Social Movements Perspective
This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take…
Muslims in Ireland: Past and Present
Muslims in Ireland is a landmark study of its topic. With the Republic of Ireland’s transition from a country of emigration to one of immigration from the mid-1990s onwards, it is also one of the f
Voices of 1968: Documents from the Global North
Sustainable Activism
In societies based on economic exploitation, unequal power and cultural hierarchies, the struggle to survive as a fully human subject is also a struggle against existing social relationships. Sustainable activism is a radical achievement. To become, and remain, a member of a community or social movement whose struggle actively challenges dominant relations of power is radical in the sense of durable participation in the attempt to transform these…
Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice
Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be "theory from above." This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means sta…
Japanese Buddhism and Ireland
This article argues that there is no single relationship between Japanese Buddhism and Ireland. Rather, there is a series of changing relationships mediated by different world-system contexts between one island and another (peripheral and post-colonial) one: as ethnographic information, as cultural influence and as religious practice. The process of building such relationships has a long history, stretching back to the Irish reception of both Jes…
Why Do European Buddhists Meditate? The Practical Problem of Inventing Global Buddhism
Globalising “Buddhism” beyond its pre-colonial homelands was a complex practical challenge. Actors seeking to bring Buddhism to new audiences in very different cultures met with failure far more often than success until recent decades. Modern-era Buddhist missionaries to Europe had to experiment, selecting elements of Asian Buddhism that could theoretically be transmitted – ordinations, preaching, textual knowledge, rituals etc. – and attempt to …
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Social movement (10 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Buddhism (6 works)