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May 31, 2019

People take to the streets to change the world. Sometimes regimes fall and power shifts, yet too often nothing much happens -- it's business-as-usual the next day. But are we missing the spirit of activism? Are mass protests actually about changing the conversation and altering our perspectives? Or is disobedience the goal in itself?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Lesley Wood, activist and York University Professor of Sociology, about her work on how ideas travel and the true purpose of protest.

About the Guest

Lesley Wood is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto. She is interested in how ideas travel, how power operates, how institutions change, how conversations influence practices, how people resist and how conflict starts, transforms and ends. Lesley is the author of Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle (2012) and co-author of the third edition of Social Movements 1768-2012, and Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing. She is an activist in the global justice and anti-poverty movements.

Learn more about Lesley, visit her blog, or follow her on Twitter (@lesleybikes).

The Quote of the Week

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."
- Elie Wiesel