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Context: School-based student protests have received little scholarly attention, yet they have the potential to impact the school community, students' civic development, and larger social movements. Principals are key actors in responding to school-based student protests. As school leaders, principals' actions affect the outcome of student protests and shape many students' first experiences as activists. Purpose: This study examines U.S. public high school principals' responses to schoolbased student protests in 2018, a year of heightened protest activity in response to gun violence in schools. The purpose of our study is to understand how a national sample of principals responded to student protests and to quantify general trends in their responses. Research Design: Using a mixed methods approach, we surveyed 491 principals during the summer of 2018; follow-up interviews were conducted with 38 principals. Analyses are grounded in the Deter-Manage-Educate framework, a new conceptual framework that we develop in this paper, organized around the three broad goals principals pursue when responding to student protests. Using this framework, we determined "how" and "how many" principals deterred, managed, and educated. Results: Findings show that very few principals outright "deterred" student protests. Nearly all principals "managed" by setting parameters around protests in an effort to balance students' right to free speech with concerns for order and safety. A majority of principals also "educated," using student protest as an opportunity to encourage civic development. Our findings suggest that an important distinction exists between principals who "channel" students toward (or away from) a particular manner of protest and principals who "facilitate reflection" to help students realize their own vision of civic engagement. Implications: This study has implications not only for principals, but also for district leaders and educational leadership organizations: Although many principals receive support for managing the logistical (and legal) challenges of responding to student protests, more attention needs to be directed toward helping principals leverage the educative opportunities that student protest can provide.

The article presents a study which reveals digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism. It mentions that rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital tools in repression, which is spread across many disciplines and areas of study.

Recent research on activism in the context of digital media has argued that organizing can happen outside of organizations and even without SMOs. This work has been focused primarily on the "supply side" of participation. In this article, we expand this line of work by focusing on the "demand side." We examine the distinction between self-directed and organizationally directed activism from the perspective of the individual, finding that shifts toward movement societies, the rise of lifestyle politics, and, to a lesser extent, changing citizenship norms explain citizen preferences for self-directed versus organizationally directed political consumption. We also analyze the relationship between political interest, different kinds of digital media use, and preferences for self-directed activism. We use original data from a survey in the U.S. on political consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand-wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a 'youth deficit' model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) resulted in over 1,800 arrests. Scholarship on repression is divided about the likely impacts of arrests on subsequent activism. Interviews with RNC arrestees are used to examine potential effects. Findings offer twists to social movements and socio-legal hypotheses: (1) while many arrestees were less willing to protest after their arrest, for many of these individuals deterrence was selective, not wholesale; (2) many factors that were expected to neutralize repressive impacts either resulted in deterrence or set the stage for radicalization; and (3) individuals who were radicalized shared strong preparation for their arrest experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers studying Internet activism have disagreed over the extent to which Internet usage alters the processes driving collective action, and therefore also over the utility of existing social movement theory. We argue that sonic of this disagreement owes to scholars studying different kinds of Internet activism. Therefore, we introduce a tvpology of Internet activism, which shows that markedly different findings are associated with different types of Internet activism, and that some types of Internet activism have been studied far more frequently than others. As a consequence, we ask an empirical question: is this skew in the selection of cases, and hence apparent t,'ends in findings, a reflection of the empirical frequency of different types of Internet activism? Troublingly, using unique data from random samples of websites discussing 20 different issue areas commonly associated with social movements, we find a mismatch between trends in research cases studied and empirical frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists of culture studying “fan activism” have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on “movement societies,” and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycotts, and e-mailing or letter-writing campaigns. Results are supportive of our hypotheses, showing that diverse claims are being pursued online, including culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims that look very different from traditional social movement claims. Findings have implications for students of social movements, sociologists of culture, and Internet studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major debate has erupted in recent work on social movements about the role of the state in protest, with some advocating alternative approaches to the study of social movements, such as a focus on institutional authorities. Using data on four types of online protest (petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and email campaigns), acquired using an innovative new methodology that produces a generalizable sample of online protest actions, this paper addresses this debate. While the state is a frequent target of online protest, a significant portion of protest activity targets other institutional authorities. The authors' analyses disaggregate the state and distinguish between types of institutional authorities, further deepening the understanding of both state and non-state actors. Their data also suggest an association between tactical forms and their targets. Finally, by using Internet data, this paper contributes to an under-studied area of social movement research: online protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the distribution and architecture of web sites hosting or directly linking to opportunities to participate in four online activist tactics: online petitioning, boycotting, and e-mailing and letter-writing campaigns. Specifically, this article addresses five basic structural questions: (1) Are opportunities to engage in these tactics usually organized around social movement organizations and/or actors? (2) Do sites tend to host or link to these tactics? (3) On average, how tactically specialized or tactically diversified are sites? (4) How are these tactics distributed across different types of sites? and (5) How many implementations of each tactic were offered per web site? Contributions include a clearer understanding of online opportunities to participate in these four tactics and the introduction of an innovative, methodological technique that generates best approximations of reachable populations of online content, which can be randomly sampled when those populations are large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various kinds of on-line activism being incorporated by social movements. The authors show in their study of the on-line strategic voting movement that emerged during the 2000 Presidential election, on-line activism has important consequences for how movements are organized, including how they make decisions. They show, for instance, that traditional movement organizations had little to do with this initiative, and that individual movement entrepreneurs were instead largely responsible. The strategic voting movement was essentially built around and facilitated by the websites of these movement entrepreneurs. Further, the authors show that this decentralized infrastructure moved decision making away from networks or organizations and their leaders to the on-line movement entrepreneurs who were less constrained by funding concerns, membership recruitment and maintenance, and organization-building. In this way, they argue, leadership decreased in importance even while discretion increased.