Framing farming: communication strategies for animal rights
the fact that the author constantly highlights the ambivalences of different strategies, the conclusion demonstrates that Nicholls favors a pragmatic approach that harmonizes frames and recognizes the discursive limitations of the national status quo. To underline his standpoint, Nicholls engages in a final skirmish with normative theory theories of global justice and post nationalism and even transnationalism. In discarding them as utopian, the author unnecessarily deviates from the largely nuanced approach in the book and digs new cleavages between normative theory and empirical scholarship. In my view, adding a theory of politics to his analysis informed by the radical democracy of Laclau and Mouffe or Ranciere would have strengthened further the argument of the book. Struggles for rights indeed introduce new inequalities within society, but these constant agonisms can also be considered a productive force of social transformation. In this light, post national theoretic perspectives and the radical activism practiced by dissident DREAMers deserve more support than Nicholls offers in his conclusion. Despite this, DREAMers is a must read for everyone interested in the immigrant rights movement in the US and undocumented mobilization in general, no matter if with an academic or activist background. Indeed, it is one of the few books that have to be read entirely it is full of interesting empirical results and partly controversial interpretations. As numerous migrants will continue to be illegalized, Nicholls' book 'The DREAMers' can only be a starting point of a largely neglected debate on rights and recognition for undocumented migrants and 'non citizens' in general.