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In this essay I contrast twentieth century heroes of freedom of speech in the Old and New Lefts with contemporary “cancel culture” and social media censorship. In so doing, my aim is to invite you to think with me about this metamorphosis and what it means for social movement research.

Most of the world’s nations have revised their constitutions to protect the human rights of their citizens. Yet there has been no national discussion in this country to write human rights into our own constitution. Building on Blau’s (2015) call to action, this work explores ways in which sociologists can align the principles of our profession to the advancement of human society and the protection of human rights.

This article introduces the term ‘convergence’ in order to explain a distinctive repertoire of protest events in which the following are present: (1) activists with an ideologically anti-capitalist orientation; (2) engage in property destruction; (3) travel from outside of the site of the protest event; and (4) solicit a determinable police response. Convergences have emerged as a subset of the alter-globalization movement since the ‘Battle in Seattle’ in 1999. Convergences have since emerged in resistance to meetings of global financial institutions, political primaries, and recently, the Olympic Games. We examine the logic that activists use to weave resistance to these disparate targets together. In this article, we arrive at this finding inductively, paying particular attention to convergence events at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. Narratives around convergence repertoires allow activists to link seemingly disparate actors with similar and predictable performances.

There have been several cross-national studies published in the world polity theoretical tradition that demonstrate the beneficial impact of international nongovernmental organizations. However, these studies neglect the role of domestic nongovernmental organizations. We address this gap in the literature by conducting a cross-national study that considers the impact of both international and domestic nongovernmental organizations on deforestation. We use data from a sample of 60 nations for the period of 1990 to 2005. We find substantial support for the world polity theory that higher levels of both types of nongovernmental organizations are associated with lower rates of deforestation. We expand the analysis to test a political opportunity structure hypothesis that democracy enhances the ability of nongovernmental organizations to deal with the causes of forest loss. In doing so, we find that international and domestic nongovernmental organizations tend to decrease forest loss more in democratic rather ...

A group of developing countries within the World Trade Organization, called the G22, formed in 2003 to bring attention to important economic concerns of the Global South. ! is coalition building at the global level is instructive to the literature on social movement coalition building and strategies in a transnational context. ! is article examines coalition building among nation-states within the context of the WTO. Drawing upon existing trading blocs, the G22 are able to leverage attention away from the WTO consensus. ! e declining signifi cance of the global institution is a result of the breaking of this consensus.

caregivers becoming close to their charges (home-health aides bringing their patients food, nannies becoming attached to the children they care for, and nurses making time to sit with patients), very little attention is paid to the efforts of caregivers to maintain their distance. Unlike household relationships and romantic relationships, such as courting, engagement, and marriage, these relationships may often start as primarily economic and without any emotional investment on the part of the caregiver or client. A physician, nurse, nurse’s aide, or emergency medical care technician can simply carry out the care necessitated by law and facility requirements, thus limiting any relationship with the patient to a business relationship. The connected-lives perspective expands on previous ideas of the interaction between the market and the social by placing the market in the realm of social relations. We maintain that this perspective is more nuanced and able to provide a more discriminating account of the complicated interweaving of the marketplace and the cultural matrix within which it is embedded. However, we have found that the connected-lives perspective does not address the full impact of power and reciprocity on intimate and ⁄or other social relationships. Both reciprocity and power relations can be said to exercise independent and significant effects on the quality of intimate relationships, as well as on the way individuals engage in relational work. To ignore either is to pitch intimate and social behavior in unrealistic terms since both reciprocity and power are inherent in so many social exchanges that take place. We do not believe that such a re-evaluation of the connected-lives perspective, as we have suggested, will be guilty of hostile-worlds dualism or nothing-but reductionism. In fact, we believe that considering them in the matrix of social and cultural processes will yield richer data and analyses very much in line with Zelizer’s original trajectory. With this fuller and more integrated account of relational work and intimate relations, Zelizer’s connected-lives approach promises to be a fruitful endeavor for those interested in the new economic sociology.