Search

This paper offers a short commentary on Professor Stott's paper, Patterns of 'disorder' during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong: policing, social identity, intergroup dynamics and radicalisation. The commentary seeks to explore the paper from the perspective of how it can contribute to the public-order policing field, as opposed to a commentary on the policing of protest in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global policymaking often seeks to create processes for the effective delivery of public goods and services. What happens when individuals critique or dissent such policies? In this paper, we examine the case of two activists—Greta Thunberg and Disha Ravi—who have been mobilizing attention toward climate change since their teenage years, and who have been both celebrated and vilified for it. While climate change policies emphasize the importance of gender mainstreaming and youth participation, reactions garnered by these two activists are instructive in highlighting the narrow notion of "participation" that undergirds climate policy. Specifically, we show that Greta and Disha's tactics do not readily jive with the postfeminist, neoliberal conceptualization of youth participation that emphasizes apolitical exercise of citizenship; valorizes girls' activism only insofar as it enhances national economic growth; and views girls as symbols of hopeful futurities. Greta and Disha are instead what we call, "policy dissidents," whose activism creates "tactical crevices." We theorize tactical crevices as tentative and fleeting interruptions by the powerless that puncture prevailing logics through strikes and protests, and through consumption of discourses and materials in ways that those in power do not intend. The paper contributes to the study of girl activism broadly, and to notions of youth engagement (or disengagement) specifically, within the spheres of local and global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self‐Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self‐education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self‐education as political and ordinary practices, first with the case of conspiracy theories, which express an individual desire for self‐education but appear as the result of a lack of self‐reliance and a failure of political self‐education, and then through the explicit claim to self‐education made by activists in ecological, anti‐racial or feminist organisations, which embodies the democratic need for self‐reliance. These two examples reveal a new kind of efficient and ordinary political power at the edge of civic commitment. This leads us to define an alternative conception of pedagogy, in which equality in self‐reliance matters. This also underlines our moral and ordinary political responsibility and challenges the traditional philosophical opposition between personal and public, subjective and universal. This paper underlines the accuracy of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's 'Self‐Reliance' in order to provide a perfectionist interpretation of activism. It also opens a new crossed perspective between the French and American approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational corporations (TNCs) shape population health both positively and negatively through their national and international social, political and economic power and influence; and are a vital commercial determinant of health. Individual and group advocacy and activism in response to corporate products, practices or policy influences can mediate negative health impacts. This paper discusses the unequal power relations existing between TNCs that promote their own financial interests, and activists and advocates who support population and environmental health by challenging corporate power. It draws on interview data from 19 respondents who informed 2 health impact assessments conducted on TNCs; 1 from the fast food industry, and 1 from the extractive industries sector. It reveals the types of strategies that civil society organizations (CSOs) have used to encourage TNCs to act in more health promoting ways. It discusses the extent to which these strategies have been effective, and how TNCs have used their power to respond to civil society action. The paper highlights the rewards, and the very real challenges faced by CSOs trying to change TNC practices related to health, within a neoliberal policy environment. It aims to provide evidence for socially oriented actors to inform their advocacy for changes in public policy or corporate practices that can contribute to improving population health and equity and tackling commercial determinants of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews, some field research, and an analysis of online material, this paper focuses on the rights struggles of diasporic Indian caste groups formerly considered "Untouchable" whose self-chosen descriptor is "Dalit." It examines Dalit activism in the United States around caste discrimination in both India and the U.S. The goal of this study is to demonstrate how Dalit American leaders use racial analogies in their international activism, and why race is a contested frame within the community. It makes clear that "universalistic" frames can obscure crucial particularities, making it harder to address the issue at hand. But it also reveals that dogmatic, particularistic frames can compromise the unity and mission of transnational movements. A 2020 lawsuit against Cisco Systems alleging caste discrimination toward a Dalit employee by Brahmin supervisors has opened the opportunity for anti-caste activists to develop a global norm specifically around how to address caste-based discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socio-political context of Taiwan has long impeded the full recognition of surviving Comfort Women and the issues they face. This paper examines the public discourses with which activists have engaged to gain public support for survivors in such a challenging environment. Besides the dominant discourses centred on nationalism and women's human rights, there is also a 'humanistic discourse' that has been undertheorized. This article discusses how activists in Taiwan initiated a humanistic public discourse that emphasizes the individual human characteristics of Comfort Women survivors, resisting the collective image reinforced by other narratives. By reflecting on the author's professional experience of arts-based social activism in this field, the paper offers new perspectives on Comfort Women discourses and the implications for human rights practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives Ageism is oftentimes sugarcoated within humor. Paper birthday cards are 1 delivery approach in which ageist messages are perpetuated and reinforced through humor. Research Design and Methods A convenience sample of birthday cards (k = 227), all indicating a decade of age, were acquired from 7 national retail stores in Colorado Springs, CO. The decades sampled ranged from 21 to 100. With a predeveloped codebook, 3 raters coded the decade birthday cards on various variables, including age group, ageist tone, and humor. Results Birthday cards intended for age 30–60 contained significantly more ageist messages compared to cards intended for age 21 and age 70–100, which did not show a significant difference from each other. Additionally, birthday cards with humor showed more ageist messages than cards without humor. Characteristics of decade birthday cards were also explored. Discussion and Implications Consumers need to learn to evaluate these ageist messages in birthday cards to reduce the perpetuation of damaging stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One effect of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup was to unleash a new wave of public engagement with the unresolved state repression of the 1980s, known as Gukurahundi. This wave was led by the 'post-Gukurahundi generation' and particularly by activists whose narratives of Gukurahundi were entwined with calls for a separate 'Mthwakazi nation'. This article explores these activists' stories of Gukurahundi and asks why they broke through into the public realm after decades of relative silence. It argues that Mthwakazi activists' engagement relied on an interpretation of Gukurahundi not simply as a discrete historical event, but as the clearest expression of an ongoing 'Grand Plan' of ethnic marginalization. This narrative was foundational to the construction of a moral order that divided the country along ethnic and regional fault lines, ultimately legitimizing Mthwakazi nationalism. The paper roots this narrative's emergence in two interrelated processes. Speaking to the role of silencing in keeping conflicts alive across generations, it examines how the 'noisy silence' that has surrounded Gukurahundi in both public and private has meant that Gukurahundi lingered as a readily available interpretative lens. This lens became meaningful when the second generation, faced with political and economic marginalization, was grappling for meaning and political belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophical arguments regarding academic freedom can sometimes appear removed from the real conflicts playing out in contemporary universities. This paper focusses on a set of issues at the front line of these conflicts, namely, questions regarding sex, gender and gender identity. We document the ways in which the work of academics has been affected by political activism around these questions and, drawing on our respective disciplinary expertise as a sociologist and a philosopher, elucidate the costs of curtailing discussion on fundamental demographic and conceptual categories. We discuss some philosophical work that addresses the conceptual distinction between academic freedom and free speech and explore how these notions are intertwined in significant ways in universities. Our discussion elucidates and emphasises the educational costs of curtailing academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the limited impact of the celebration in the U.S. of the 1968 the International Year for Human Rights (IYHR) to mark the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Topics covered include the lack of salience of the United Nations within the U.S. in these years, the complicated politics of 1968 in the U.S. which provided an opportunity to the evolution of human rights activism between the late 1940s and late 1970s, and observance activities of the IYHR in the U.S. which represented the tail end of 1940s-inspired activism.

In the era of disability rights, medical schools retained the power to discriminate against applicants in wheelchairs. This article explores how medical schools set boundaries for admission into the profession, remained intransigent in their discrimination, and persuaded courts to side with them. Interviews with physicians in wheelchairs, legal documents, medical journal articles, and white papers demonstrate how medical schools established physical standards for entry into the profession specifically in response to applicants with disabilities. In the 1970s, medical schools created exclusionary physical requirements and persuaded the Supreme Court that these "technical standards" preserved patient safety. In the 1980s, schools asserted that students with disabilities would require expensive accommodations and lower educational standards. In the 1990s, medical schools strategically interpreted vague language in the Americans with Disabilities Act to justify continuing to exclude applicants with disabilities. This article complicates triumphalist histories of disability activism and reveals the continuation of exclusion in medical education, which had historically occurred based on race and gender. Interviews with successful applicants in wheelchairs provide powerful testimony against medical school policies and offer a clear path forward. Technical standards should change to value compassion and critical thinking over physical fitness. Physicians in wheelchairs perform most medical tasks and bring unique perspectives to a historically homogenous profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a historical study of community renewal, as it was articulated and operationalized in NSW, Australia in the period 1999–2006 to improve conditions on public housing estates. The key argument is that community practitioners need to pay closer attention to the power relations involved in actual interventions that claim to empower others. Further, it is argued that such an analysis is a crucial aspect of developing critical, reflexive and innovative forms of practice which have the potential to reconfigure power relations and open possibilities for new understandings of community. Case examples of the implementation of community renewal are included to show the tensions involved when practitioners engage in empowerment practices that are coercive in that they include the exercise of regulatory and disciplinary power. It is incumbent upon community work practitioners and those who educate aspiring practitioners to understand that policies and programmes utilizing community as a solution to social problems are not benign, nor are they necessarily solely politically expedient, although the dangers lay in conceiving and enacting them as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that globally networked activism such as that triggered by the murder of George Floyd has dramatically amplified, and consequently rendered processes of police reform and accountability more vulnerable to exogenous influences. Recently witnessed activism in this sphere derives much of its significance from the ability to leverage the latest audio-visual technologies and social media platforms. The Black Lives Matter protests demonstrate how these technologies and platforms make flashpoint images of violent policing visible to diverse, global audiences in an extraordinary manner. Using the examples of Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that these viral images have the capacity to 'collapse contexts' and radically disrupt policing in the places to which they migrate. The complicated impact of migrating flashpoint images of violent policing from 'over there' to 'over here' necessitates urgent analysis and debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when different groups in society are achieving notable gains in respect and rights, activists in mental health and proponents of mad positive approaches, such as Mad Pride, are coming up against considerable challenges. A particular issue is the commonly held view that madness is inherently disabling and cannot form the grounds for identity or culture. This paper responds to the challenge by developing two bulwarks against the tendency to assume too readily the view that madness is inherently disabling: the first arises from the normative nature of disability judgments, and the second arises from the implications of political activism in terms of being a social subject. In the process of arguing for these two bulwarks, the paper explores the basic structure of the social model of disability in the context of debates on naturalism and normativism, the applicability of the social model to madness, and the difference between physical and mental disabilities in terms of the unintelligibility often attributed to the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1907, Karl Pearson created the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College, University of London. His ambitions emphasised both discipline building and the assertion of primacy for university research in eugenics over political activism. An academic entrepreneur, Pearson operated the 'Eugenics Laboratory' as a publishing house or imprint. It published five series. Because titles in each series were printed as ad hoc private separates for much of their duration, current bibliographic records show considerable variation and error while historical studies of the Eugenics Laboratory tend toward fragmentation. This paper presents a comprehensive inventory for each series associated with the Eugenics Laboratory, and it offers brief analysis of emerging patterns. The series inventoried are: (1) Eugenics Laboratory Lectures, (2) Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, (3) The Treasury of Human Inheritance, (4) Questions of the Day and of the Fray, and (5) Studies in National Deterioration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1964, the UK government imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, which it maintained until the end of the white minority rule. What explains this embargo? Using mainly archival evidence, this paper demonstrates that domestic political dynamics in the United Kingdom mediated the influence of the transnational anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles on the British government. The United Kingdom imposed and maintained this embargo due in part to a domestic advocacy network, whose hub was the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The paper provides a comprehensive explanation of an important issue in British foreign policy, the anti-colonial struggle, and Southern Africa's history. There are theoretical implications for foreign policy analysis concerning the role of advocacy networks, interactions between local and global activism, the role of political parties' ideology and contestation, the effects on foreign policy of changes in a normative environment, the effects of norm contestation, and normative determinants of sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the determination of income taxes in a dynamic setting with human capital accumulation. The goal is to understand the factors that support an outcome without complete redistribution, given a majority of relatively poor agents and the inability to commit to future taxes. All agents agree ex ante that limiting tax and transfers is beneficial but a majority favours large redistribution, ex post , at the time of the vote. In a political influence game, group activism limits the support for expropriatory taxation and preserves incentives. In some cases, the outcome corresponds to the optimal allocation under commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, the first formal association of mental patients, their relatives, and mental health professionals was founded in Athens, Greece. The Motion for the Rights of the "Mentally Ill" proposed a total restructuring of mental health care and a novel conceptualization of mental illness. On the one hand, it demanded that the mental health system be based on open services, psychotherapy, and on patients' active participation in all decisions concerning their treatment and life. On the other hand, it conceptualized mental illness as a political issue that concerned all. Thus, the Motion viewed the promotion of the rights of the mentally ill as part of a broader project of cultivating conscious, active, and collective citizenship. This paper traces the Motion's history during the 1980s, showing that it was shaped by both the socio-political conditions of Greece in the post-dictatorship period, a time of intense politicization, and by the legacy of mental patient activism in the Western world during the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that, although the Motion had a limited long-term impact, it represented the mental patient movement in Greece as it furthered the latter's main features, most importantly its twofold endeavor to change not only the mental health system and the attitudes towards mental illness, but also society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a citizen's decision to participate in political activism depend on the participation of others? We conduct a nationwide natural field experiment in collaboration with a major European party during a recent national election. In a party survey, we randomly provide canvassers with true information about the canvassing intentions of their peers. When learning that more peers participate in canvassing than previously believed, canvassers significantly reduce both their canvassing intentions and behaviour. An additional survey among party supporters underscores the importance of free-riding motives and reveals that there is strong heterogeneity in motives underlying supporters' behavioural responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how national newspapers reported, portrayed, and narrated the militant suffragism of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Using three popular newspapers, the Daily Mail , the Daily Express , and the Daily Mirror and the specific case study of hunger strikes and the government's response of forcible feeding, it evaluates the various tropes that characterized press coverage of the suffragettes. It investigates how militancy, an approach that prioritized spectacle, was covered in an emerging medium that sought to recast politics in a new and spectacular fashion, thereby extending understanding of how the style and content of popular newspapers evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, it expands existing research into the dynamics of the nascent popular press and its function as an 'arena' for fostering extra-parliamentary political debate. The WSPU attempted to take advantage of this opportunity to promote its own arguments on forcible feeding and female suffrage, using correspondence columns and prisoner testimony to elicit empathy, albeit with only sporadic success in receiving a sympathetic hearing from a hostile press, with enmity a consistent feature of editorial argument. Nevertheless, the article concludes that responses to hunger strikes and forcible feeding in the popular press were multifaceted, and whilst the WSPU was unable to reframe patriarchal narratives of political activism, it persisted with words as well as deeds in seeking to co-opt newspapers into its campaign and garner publicity for its cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hedge fund activists have ambiguous relationships with the institutional shareholders in their target firms. While some support their activities, others counter their actions. Due to their relatively small holdings in target firms, activists typically need the cooperation of other institutional shareholders that are willing to influence the activists' campaign success. We find the presence of "activism-friendly" institutions as owners is associated with an increased probability of being a target, higher long-term stock returns, and higher operating performance. Overall, we provide evidence suggesting the composition of a firm's ownership has significant effects on hedge fund activists' decisions and outcomes. (JEL: G13, G23, G34) Received March 12, 2020; editorial decision July 13, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world went to war in 1914, a group of politicians, scholars and activists developed a radically new concept of foreign policy. It rested on the assumption that the war was the result of a flawed diplomatic system and that democratic institutions would make international relations more peaceful. Specifically, they proposed a set of reforms to improve parliamentary oversight, to prohibit secret treaties and to make foreign affairs more accessible to the general public. Most historians have written them off as pacifist propagandists or isolated national splinter groups. However, as this article shows, the advocates of democratic control built a transnational campaign across more than two dozen countries and drew up an elaborate agenda which anticipated long-lasting debates about foreign policy governance. The leaders of the campaign — including American educationalist Fannie Fern Andrews, German social democrat Eduard Bernstein and British politician Arthur Ponsonby — began by protesting decision-making in July 1914, but gradually worked out a more rigorous foreign policy critique. They hosted conferences, circulated academic-style publications and lobbied governments. Although their programme resonated with Wilsonian and socialist visions for a democratic peace, it failed to materialize in 1919. Ultimately, it remained an exercise in democratic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s, widespread popular-cultural deference to the authority of science and medicine in the United States began to wane as a generation of journalists and activists reevaluated and criticized researchers and physicians. This article uses the career of feminist journalist Barbara Seaman to show the role that the emerging genre of critical science writing played in this broader cultural shift. First writing from her position as a mother, then as the wife of a physician, and finally as a credentialed science writer, Seaman advanced through distinct categories of journalistic authority throughout the 1960s. An investigation of Seaman's early years in the profession also vividly demonstrates the roles that gender and professional expertise played in both constricting and permitting new forms of critique during this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a relational approach to regional western history, this article examines the ways organizers based in the American West negotiated with East Coast philanthropists over conflicting visions of civil rights activism. Ultimately, these debates reveal the possibilities and limits of philanthropic support within leftist movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an institutional movement logics approach to analyze the structure and dynamics of the US social movement field from 1960 to 1995. Using protest event data taken from the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset, we elicit the most salient combinations of issues, tactics, and targets reported to co-occur at protest events in four periods: 1960–1965, 1966–1972, 1973–1987, and 1988–1995. The analysis reveals the existence of six movement logics of varying breadth, flexibility, and stability. We also detect two important shifts in the overall structure of the field, one toward a broad and flexible form of state-centric politics and one toward several differentiated and narrowly defined forms of nonpolitical contention. We find support for two key premises of the institutional movement logics framework, limited diversity, and relative stability within and between logics while showing that a longer time frame offers a window on field dynamics not visible with shorter study time frames. We close by providing suggestions for further research seeking to build on the institutional movement logics approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the formation and subsequent securitization of the digital protest movement Anonymous, highlighting the emergence of social antagonists from communication itself. In contrast to existing approaches that implicitly or explicitly conceptualize Othering (and securitization) as unidirectional process between (active) sender and (passive) receiver, an approach that is based on communication gives the 'threat' a voice of its own. The concept proposed in this paper focuses on 'designations' as communicating rules and attributes with regard to a government object. It delineates how designations give rise to the visibility of political entities and agency in the first place. Applying this framework, we can better understand the movement's path from a bunch of anonymous individuals to the collectivity 'Anonymous,' posing a threat to certain bases of the state's ontological existence, its prerogative to secrecy, and challenging its claim to unrestrained surveillance. At the same time, the state's bases are implicated and reproduced in the way this conflict is constructed. The conflict not only (re)produces and makes visible 'the state' as a social entity, but also changes or at least challenges the self-same entity's agency and legitimacy. Such a relational approach allows insights into conflict formation as dynamic social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution that social workers make to communities is integral to the principles and values of the profession but is often ‘hidden’ and unacknowledged. This paper is an exploration of social workers' engagement with community work approaches in a range of settings in the Republic of Ireland, where managerialism and a climate of austerity pose particular challenges for social work practice. By exploring the findings of qualitative interviews with social work practitioners, the paper examines themes and issues that emerge in the context of their practice settings and considers how community work ideas are enacted in contemporary social work practice. These ideas challenge dominant discourses and emphasise a process of active engagement with communities to counter inequality and injustice and seek change at both community and societal levels. The concept of ‘creative activism’ is developed to explore the idea of critical practice and the different forms of collective action that social workers undertake. The use of these ideas to strengthen the links between theory, research and practice on a postgraduate qualifying social work degree is discussed. The paper seeks to re-emphasise the place of community work within social work research, theory, practice and professional education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing activism around the right to food in the past decade, there has been little exploration of how people understand the right and its implications. This article analyses original research that explored how people at risk of hunger understood the right to food in diverse settings in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in the aftermath of the global food crisis of 2008. The article explores understandings of the term in different contexts, its various sources and origins, and how responsibilities for upholding it were defined and allocated. It concludes that an understanding of the right to food as natural and necessary appears to be 'common sense': shared across contexts and groups, and part of how people negotiate their right to food in everyday life. Yet the content, origins and allocation of responsibilities for realizing the right to food also seemed to be more closely shaped by local realities than by universalist human rights or legal frameworks. Nonetheless, the view that the state was responsible for protecting citizens' right to food in the last resort resonated across contexts that were otherwise marked by greatly differing histories and state capacities for realizing the right to food. The paper explores some of the implications of this 'common sense' view for right to food activism and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on eleven months of engaged research with the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH) in the Barcelona metropolitan region and involvement in the movement post-2014 as an activist, this paper considers the processes through which people facing foreclosure and eviction become political subjects. Community development, in this context, is seen as a transformative, bottom-up process, unfolding as PAH members collectively push institutional housing-related boundaries by both producing and enacting learned political practices 'from below'. A Rancierian framing of political subjectivation is used and extended to understand how the PAH ruptures indebted subjectivities and assistentialist approaches to mortgage problems, and the challenges such processes face. Upon a brief contextualization of Spain's 1997-2007 housing boom, plus the PAH's antecedents and emergence in the post-2008 crisis period, I argue that collective advising assemblies and actions are co-constitutive spaces where processes of political subjectivation are generated and enacted. Collective advising assemblies are spaces where people unable to pay their mortgage begin to disidentify with their position in the dominant economic and political configuration and begin to shed their guilt, shame and fear. This process flows through and feeds into actions like blocking evictions, occupying empty bankowned housing or banks, spaces to enact one's disidentification with the existing order and materialize new ways of acting and being. Concluding thoughts identify what the experience of the PAH means for understanding political subjectivation and community development in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of socially engaged art practice over the last decade is considered in light of the relationship between social work, art and social change. The question posed is 'has social work--caught in neo-liberal paternalism--given way to socially engaged art as a medium of social change?' The paper argues that, as social workers have vacated public spaces of activism and change, so artists have moved in to fill the void and suggests there has never been a bettertimeto reinvigorate critical social work and its emancipatory potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on policy transfer and policy mobility has focused much attention on relatively elite actors, such as politicians, international organisations, think tanks, philanthropic donors, and consultancy firms. In contrast, this article uses the case of 'harm reduction' drug policy, an area of practice and research that is committed to valuing 'non-elite' actors, to show how they are frequently involved in mobilizing policy knowledge. Focusing on the role of service providers, activists and service users in the mobilization of harm reduction models, the paper discusses four key practices associated with these non-elite actors: cooperation, convergence, disobedience and display. The article argues that the deep involvement of relatively non-elite actors in mobilizing harm reduction policies means that multi-disciplinary scholarship would be enriched by going 'into the ordinary' in a wide range of policy contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) monitor global value chains? While NGOs regularly denounce the behavior of multinational corporations throughout the world, their motivations for choosing campaign targets remain largely unknown. Using a new dataset on activists' campaigns toward multinational firms, we estimate a triadic gravity equation for campaigns, involving the NGO, firm, and action countries. Our results point to a strong proximity bias in NGO activity: Distance, national borders, and lack of a common language all contribute to impede the intensity of campaigns. We estimate the distance elasticity of campaigns to be −0.2 and further document that NGOs strongly bias their actions toward home firms or foreign firms with home actions. A domestic firm is 3.45 times more likely to be attacked than a foreign one. Foreign firms headquartered in common language countries draw 1.63 times more campaigns. Overall, campaigns seem to be designed so as to include at least one element of proximity drawing the attention of consumers. This pattern questions the role of NGOs in the monitoring of multinational production operated in remote, unfamiliar locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer feedback platforms offer consumers tools to provide feedback on their market and consumption experiences. Beyond broad prior characterizations, little is known about the specific means by which platforms affect empowerment. Elements of empowerment identified in extant studies include voice, choice, justice, inclusion, catalysis, and consciousness-raising. We research a popular Brazilian platform to learn how platforms facilitate and constrain consumer empowerment. Our approach is immersive, a more-than-human netnography of the platform involving depth interviews with twenty-one of its consumer and corporate users. Findings show same-side and cross-side network effects driving the ability of the platform to offer consumers empowerment. Furthermore, affordances are critically important. Affordances provide opportunities for consumer choice, voice, justice, and inclusion. However, platforms' cross-side network effects create economic considerations that limit those opportunities in theoretically and practically important ways. Although other feedback platforms might offer catalysis and consciousness-raising elements of empowerment, our focal platform does not. Earlier studies of consumer empowerment on the Internet may have been overly general and exuberant because they failed to recognize the constraining impacts of network effects, affordances, and algorithms. Consumer-citizenry, collective action, and consumer power are thoroughly transformed in the age of the platform, opening up new spaces for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HBO's Last Week Tonight has frequently featured host John Oliver's critiques of global neoliberalism. His pronouncements are often not just the taking of an ideological position, but a moral one which borders on the theological, conceptualizing the entrenchment of inequality as a normative evil. It is a form of activism where he uses his platform to exhort his audience to fight back against large, impersonal forces that he portrays as taking advantage of them. This article analyzes the program's mentions of the institutional effects of these policies on individuals and the economy and how mainstream media sources have either amplified or ignored his claims. "Serious" journalism is more likely to cover his stories that have simple, dramatic villains rather than complex causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors argue that Hollywood played an important part magnifying "pro-Israel" sentiment that was of "inestimable value to Israel and its American supporters" (11). I Hollywood and Israel: A History i is a product of a long-standing collaboration between Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman - two historians with extensive expertise researching Cold War propaganda and cinematic politics across borders. Shaw and Goodman have the knack for finding and unpacking interesting examples of how Hollywood stars worked to advance the Israel brand. [Extracted from the article]

This article offers a critical assessment of efforts to address the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict. We begin with an overview of government-led initiatives since 1998 and then reflect on three underpinning themes: justice, accountability and the tilt towards impunity; the shift from 'truth' to 'information' recovery; and the instrumentalization of history. We then offer a reflexive assessment of our endeavours to contribute to a 'from below' variant of legal, political and historical advocacy. Reflecting on our efforts to contest and critique successive government proposals, we draw out three overlapping 'ideal types' of transitional justice advocacy: technical engagement, coalition building and exposition. We conclude by highlighting the very specific challenges of engaging in transitional justice scholarship and advocacy in a 'post-truth' era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some post-Roe abortion providers, the emotional cost of their abortion practice was untenable. By the 1980s, former abortion providers had become prominent anti-abortion advocates. Although physicians such as Beverly McMillan grounded their pro-life conversions in medical technologies and "fetological" research, affective connections to the fetus animated their activism. McMillan explained that through abortion practice, the medical profession – her vocation – had gone astray, and her pro-life activism was the cure to the resulting emotional damage. For these physicians, emotional well-being could only be recovered through principled attempts to right the perceived wrongs of the medical profession. Another group of emotionally-engaged pro-life health workers emerged from their pasts as abortion patients. Myriad post-abortion narratives followed the same trajectory: the woman reluctantly underwent an abortion, and was subsequently plagued by apathy, depression, grief, guilt, and substance-use disorders. Pro-life research came to understand this cluster of symptoms as Post-abortion Syndrome (PAS). Some women, such as Susan Stanford-Rue, opted to heal from their pain by becoming PAS counselors. Just as the "reformed" physicians combined their affective experiences with their medical expertise to argue against abortion, the counselors merged emotion and psychiatric language to redefine what it meant to be an "aborted woman" and therefore a PAS counselor. Examining pro-life publications, Christian counseling manuals, and activist speeches, this article argues that, for these activists, science and technology provided the rationale to make abortion unthinkable, but it was the activists' emotional framework that made this rationale pro-life in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, uses rest as a "healing mechanism" and a form of resistance. With a vibrant social media following, the Nap Ministry builds upon a strong history of Black feminist activism that centers the lived experiences of Black women. According to Hersey, rest is personal and political, a fight against the commodification and exploitation of laboring Black folks from chattel slavery to contemporary grind and hustle culture. This article explores how Hersey builds upon a lineage of Black women's activism in digital spaces while also exploring rest, "soul care," and communal healing as ideologies rooted in Black (cyber)feminism. I argue that Nap Ministry constellates Womanism, Black (cyber)feminism, and Black liberation theory by promoting the power of rest, encouraging resistance against what bell hooks describes as the "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" that exploits Black women's labor and renders their voices invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the way local social movements respond to structural transformations in city politics. Drawing from archival research, published scholarship, and 51 in-depth interviews, we characterize the mobilization of experts into social movements in Greater Boston since the 1960s as a long-term shift from "protecting places" to "providing services." Consonant with a shift from centralized to decentralized municipal government, we show how an initially unified resistance to urban renewal morphed into two diverging and opposing movements. One focused on housing affordability and relied on market-driven tactics; the other sought to enhance the "production of nature" through grassroots community organizing. These findings support two contributions to the scholarship on expert activism by showing that: (1) social movement organizations (SMOs) respond to structural shifts epistemologically, as well as organizationally; and (2) expert activism can alter the conditions and context of knowledge production in neighborhoods and the movements that rise in their defense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of teaching and conducting research "at the edges" within the field of community development. Drawing from the experiences of community development programs at the University of Glasgow, the authors emphasize the significance of acknowledging the challenges faced by marginalized individuals and students, especially those deeply engaged in community work and activism.

Transitional justice in Spain is still an ongoing process. This article examines the impact of memory laws and the rise of the radical right on transitional justice measures and the historical memory movement in Spain. It contends that the continued application of the 46/1977 Amnesty Law and the campaigning by radical right party Vox to repeal memory laws left a legal vacuum that precipitated interventions by memory activist groups. It is argued that these protest actions are a form of advocacy for participatory transitional justice. The article first focuses on Andalusia's 2017 memory law and the rise of Vox in the region. Subsequently, it examines the effect of the state's Democratic Memory Law (2022) on memory and justice measures and argues that both bottom-up approaches by civil society organizations and top-down measures by state actors are essential to transform Spain into a society anchored in the five pillars of transitional justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the gynecologist Włodzimierz Fijałkowski, the key promoter of preparation for childbirth in Communist and early democratic Poland. From the late 1950s until the 1990s, Fijałkowski developed a childbirth preparation training protocol that served as an inspiration for childbirth preparation schools across the country. Through analysis of Fijałkowski's publications in medical journals, books aimed at both professional and lay readers, visual aids for childbirth training, and archival material, we demonstrate that a specific vision of gender roles and relationships lay at the core of Fijałkowski's psychoprophylactic project. This vision represented a re-definition and re-essentialization of femininity and masculinity, and motherhood and fatherhood, while simultaneously advocating for radical change in the relationship between women in labor and obstetric professionals. Fijałkowski's ideas and advocacy were intimately connected with a humanization of the embryo and fetus from the earliest stages of pregnancy, and we show how his work became an important transmission medium for the gradual mainstreaming of anti-abortion ideas within public discourse in late-Communist Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual archive of AIDS and fetish activism is a rich resource for studying interlinkages between art and science, activism and public health, politics and medicine, pleasure and sexual health prevention. This article explores AIDS and fetish activism imagery from the first two decades of the Norwegian AIDS crisis. Interrogating the materiality and visual context of images – photographs, posters, flyers, and safer sex instructions – it maps out visualization practices in leather, BDSM and AIDS activism. AIDS and fetish imagery made some bodies, pleasures, and political goals visible – and rendered others unseen. The article explores the materiality of images and their visual, social, and historical context of production, and traces their social biographies and afterlives. Fetish images were vehicles for change and actors co-producing history. They took part in destigmatizing BDSM, challenging psychiatric classification, and creating infrastructure and networks between subcultures, communities, and authorities. The visualization of fetish activism was as much about communication strategies as it was about aesthetic, style, and motive. The politics of visibility in Norwegian fetish activism point to the vulnerable project of fighting for acceptance through "respectability," while preserving the individuality and "otherness" of leather and fetish culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the connection between performance art and political activism. Topics discussed include the comparison between performative activism and constructive action, the modern manifestation of performance art by Futurists and Dadaists according to art historians, the distinction between performatives and constatives according to philosopher J. L. Austin, the historical emergence of performance art according to the writings of philosopher David Davies and art historian RoseLee Goldberg, and the evaluation of several performance art exhibitions such as Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece," Marina Abramovic's "The Artist Is Present," and Tenching Hsieh's "One Year Performance."

2 This article refers to "China" as the regime in mainland China, named the People's Republic of China, and "Taiwan" as the regime on the island of Taiwan, named the Republic of China. 129 "LüMei huaqiao he huayi Meiguo renshi relie huanyin ZhongMei jianjiao xiwang Taiwan fangmian yi guojia wei zhong zaori huigui zuguo [U.S.-based overseas Chinese and Americans of Chinese descent enthusiastically welcome U.S.-China normalization, hoping that Taiwan respects the nation and returns to the motherland soon]", I People's Daily i , December 19, 1978, 5. The new leader of China reiterated the message to Taiwan "compatriots": Beijing would "take into account the present realities in Taiwan, respect the opinions of the people in Taiwan, and adopt reasonable policies" in seeking to unify the island.[131] With a violent takeover unlikely, the new status quo in the Taiwan Strait, and the new relationship between Chinese Americans and China, seemed acceptable for all sides. In the fall of 1980, sinologist Wei Peh T'i revisited her hometowns in China, Nanjing and Chongqing, for the first time since she left for New York in 1947, at age sixteen. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores transnational anti-gender networking promoting "the natural family." We focus on the World Congress of Families (WCF) and investigate how it is organized transnationally. We draw on international relations theory on challenges to the liberal international order as well as on theories on transcalar activism. The empirical material includes observations from two conferences and material produced by the WCF itself. We discuss the WCF's role in relation to political polarization, and we also analyze it as a social structure: its actor constellations and new forms of activism. The analysis shows that strategic networking with elites as well as grassroots has rendered the WCF a significant player in global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In intersectionality studies, debates about the additive versus constitutive nature of intersectionality are long-established. This article attempts to intervene in these conversations by examining how additive, "diversity within" intersectionality works in practice. Across feminist academia, advocacy, and policymaking, there is a widely held perception that among the nongovernmental organizations constituted around identity-based inequalities (feminist, racial justice, migrants, disability, and LGBTQI+ rights), it is the feminist sector that best advocates for and attempts to practice intersectionality. This is related to the appropriation of Black feminist theories of intersectionality which emerged from grassroots activism and Critical Race scholarship as "feminist" theory, wherein feminist is always-already constructed as white. Drawing on empirical research with equality organizations working with disabled women and trans women in England and Scotland, this article suggests that the opposite is true: the additive intersectionality practiced by the white-led feminist sector serves to uphold white supremacy and other structural inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a pan-South Asian phenomenon that marks certain groups and bodies as untouchable, caste-based discriminatory practices have also traveled with the South Asian diaspora. This article examines the case of anti-caste activism, especially in the context of its transnational potentials which have blossomed with the ubiquitous uptake of digital technology worldwide. We examine anti-caste activism in the US through the work of Equality Labs, an anti-caste civil rights organization that works with digital and non-digital activist strategies. Analyzing a range of material including surveys and reports, online chatter, and journalistic discourse we show how the organization's work is part of a larger, transnational network of anti-caste activism—something we term the anti-caste alter-network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the long decline of US unions, research on union wage effects has struggled with selection problems and inadequate theory. I draw on the sociology of labor to argue that unions use non-market sources of power to pressure companies into raising wages. This theory of union power implies a new test of union wage effects: does union activism have an effect on wages that is not reducible to workers’ market position? Two institutional determinants of union activity are used to empirically isolate the wage effect of union activism from labor market conditions: increased union revenue from investment shocks and increased union activity leading up to union officer elections. Instrumental variable analysis of panel data from the Department of Labor shows that a 1 percent increase in union spending increases a proxy for union members’ wages between 0.15 percent and 0.30 percent. These wage effects are larger in years of active collective bargaining, and when unions increase spending in ways that could pressure companies. The results indicate that non-market sources of union power can affect workers’ wages and that even in a period of labor weakness unions still play a role in setting wages for their members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social activism is a burgeoning human response to pressing problems around the world, and nowhere is this response more apparent than in the ongoing global push back against environmental externalities. In this article, we explore—for the first time—whether there are degrees of activism that relate to degrees of regulatory stringency. Using data on environmental conflicts resulting from fossil fuel production across 68 countries over the period 1995–2014, we find that, for a given tax rate, a move from a lax to more stringent regime lowers the rate of environmental conflicts. These findings underscore the contingent role of policy stringency as a trigger for intense social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]