Social Mobilization of the Underdogs: The Damansara Save Our School Movement in Malaysia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How are social movements of the underdogs sustained and how are constraints of these movements overcome, in particular, constraints imposed by non-liberal democratic states? Utilizing the Damansara Save Our School movement in Malaysia as its case study, this article describes factors that led to the successful resistance of the Damansara New Village community against the closure of its community school, the Damansara Chinese Primary School. Although inexperienced in social movement activities, small in size, financially and socially disadvantaged, the villagers of Damansara New Village successfully sustained their resistance for seven years and eventually procured compromises from the Malaysian authorities, which reopened the school premises in January 2009. Lacking access to democratic institutions in the country, the Damansara Save Our School movement relied on unconventional—yet highly institutionalised— resistance methods to mobilize support and engage in political contention. This article analyzes three components that had led to the movement’s successful endurance: institutionalization of the Save Our School Committee as the main mobilization machinery; formation of a temple school that sustained the functioning of the school, physically and symbolically; and dynamic adaptation of movement repertoires to overcome constraints imposed by the stronger and not so liberal state. For the movement community and supporters alike, the reopening of the school premises in 2009 attests to the miracle of everyday resistance by underdogs in surmounting unjust policies imposed by a powerful state.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".