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An introduction to this journal's Special Topic Forum (STF) section is presented which features articles focusing on several topics including entrepreneurship, gender and racial diversity, and social movements.

Stigmatization is pervasive in society. Stigma may arise from the core attributes of a social group, such as race, nationality, religion, class, sexuality, and disability, which can induce significant negative impacts on group members. While scholars have documented how stigmatized groups can organize to challenge the prejudice they face, research has been slow to account for the rise of social media—a digital disruption that characterizes a critical feature of the "new normal." Yet, the emergence of social media technology has transformed the cultural potential of relationship building within and across social groups. In this paper, we examine anti-stigma organizing in the age of social media. We theorize how social movement organizations use social media to enact three audience-focused anti-stigma framing processes. These processes structure three distinct types of social bond, and, when iterated over time, shape three corresponding types of solidarity that support the social inclusion of stigmatized groups and reduce group stigma. Through our framework, we contribute to research on stigma and social movements by conceptualizing the role of social media in anti-stigma organizing, and by building new theory about the relationship between solidarity and stigma reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite consumer concern over climate change, research on environmental issues and sport fandom has focused more on organizational outcomes than on fans themselves. Recognizing fandom can be representative of social movements, and social identity and collective action are utilized in an intrinsic case study of Forest Green Rovers football club supporters (who also identify with environmentalism) to understand the extent to which the club represents a social movement, and whether Forest Green Rovers' sustainability efforts encourage pro-environment actions. Through interview research, we found supporters' team and environmental identities cooperate synergistically. Forest Green Rovers is not just representative of environmentalism but has become a politicized identity itself—a means to act for change on environmental issues. We discuss implications concerning identity synergy, team identity as a politicized identity, perceptions of success, collective action, and cognitive alternatives to the status quo. We conclude by noting the unavoidable inseparability of environmental issues and sport consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of how emotions shape the participation of professions' clients in episodes of jurisdictional contestation. Our model begins with a framing contest between a social movement that disrupts a profession's jurisdictional control and the profession that defends it. We theorize how, through adversarial framing efforts, the movement and profession each seek to evoke emotions in particular ways to shape the actions of clients in their favor. We then explore how the emotional resonance of this framing contest leads individual clients to support, to varying degrees, one or both contestants. We argue that clients experiencing different configurations of pride, anger, shame, and fear—or ambivalence when these emotions overlap in conflicting ways—enact one of five modes of participation. With this article, we contribute to the literature on professions by (a) conceptualizing client participation in jurisdictional contestation across analytical levels, (b) considering the role of a constellation of intertwined social emotions in this process, (c) and introducing a typology of five modes of client participation in jurisdictional contestation. We develop the model by drawing on empirical examples from health-related professions, but we also discuss its generalizability to other work domains and stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a large and growing body of literature has investigated the relationship between music and social movements in the U.S., few scholars focus on the role that radio and music played during the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes. Analyzing thirty-nine episodes from the Pacifica archive of Radio Free Alcatraz, alongside interviews conducted with organizers, participants, and performers associated with the occupation, as well as field work at contemporary Sunrise Gatherings on Alcatraz Island, this paper examines the relationship between radio, sound, music, humor, and political activism emanating from the 1969 occupation. I argue that the sounds of Alcatraz—including the radio broadcasts—carry the lessons of the past into the present and future and assert sonic sovereignty. This sonic continuity serves as both a memory and a guide for future Indigenous movements, challenging settler-colonial norms by maintaining a connection to land, ancestors, and community through sound. Through what I am calling an Indigenous Sound Studies (ISS) framework, I highlight how sound, space, and time intersect to build relations, remember the past, foster solidarity, and imagine new futures. The sonic moments of the 1969 occupation provide insights into the enduring power of sound to shape activism and self-determination for Indigenous peoples.

Diversity training is situated in a cultural context characterized by sociopolitical polarization, complex and fluid social identities, social movements, and debates over its appropriateness. Yet, we lack theories on the drivers of diversity learning and transfer that consider both unique workforce composition characteristics and contextual changes. Diversity training researchers have focused primarily on static aspects of training design and content while largely ignoring the role of the learner. Because these oversights have fueled persistent questions about the effectiveness of diversity training, we offer a learner-centric, process-based model of diversity training that acknowledges the broader context in which it is situated and its influence on trainee motivation, learning, and transfer. We consider the interplay among the design factors, learning context, and learner characteristics in the pre-training, training, and post-training environments, and explore the self-regulatory mechanisms through which trainees can guide their learning. We close by discussing how our process model of diversity training changes our understanding of past research and redirects future research, and we apply the model to several prototypical diversity learner personas to demonstrate how it can be used in practice to personalize diversity training and address barriers to its effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 25 years, a hermeneutic struggle has unfolded in English football between those spectators who wish to stand at matches and the risks associated with this practice in all-seated stadia. Amid this tension, fans have had to negotiate a neoliberal and authoritarian regime. However, the struggles of supporters against social control in football are characterized by the building of a long-term social movement against all-seating. In seeking to break down the state's disciplinary power and its marketization of football, this movement, "Safe Standing," has achieved several recent policy-based victories in the United Kingdom and Europe and is now firmly embedded within sports stadia developments and the demands of fans in North America and Australasia. Although these different contexts are temporally and culturally sensitive, they are interdependently linked through relational time frames and discursive practices that make up the modern consumption of football. This research applies relational sociology to analyze the fan networks that successfully built this movement across the U.K. fan activist scene, characterized by relational collective action, which complicates the individual and collective dimensions of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young Americans are coming of age immersed in daily news and controversy about rising perils like climate change, and emerging ones like artificial intelligence. Generation Z has produced and embraced movements for climate action like the school strikes led by Greta Thunberg that connect to other social justice movements. But the threat posed by nuclear weapons remains a disconnected abstraction to many young people, even as tensions between nuclear-armed states over conflicts like the invasions of Ukraine and Gaza renew fears of a nuclear confrontation that were more common decades ago. In this personal essay, a life-long opponent of nuclear weapons raised during the Cold War reflects on intergenerational lessons about activism, and teaching college students to embrace their curiosity, and their fear, on the way to saving the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though recent waves of large-scale street protests have not directly targeted the business sector, they can still represent a major development in a company's external environment. Building on the literature on community embeddedness, this study extends activism-as-information theory to understand how and when companies respond to street protests that take place in their communities. We argue that for business leaders, the scale of protests serves as an information update regarding the changing relevance of the protested social issue in a community. Using data from 2017 to 2020 on Women's March protests in the United States, we show that the scale of street protests in local communities is associated with the likelihood of subsequent female director appointments for corporations headquartered in those communities: larger-scale protests are associated with a higher likelihood of such appointments. Further, we show that this response to proximal protests is heightened for protests that occur in local communities least aligned with the protest movement and for companies least internally aligned with the protest goals. Our theory and findings extend research on social movements in markets, showing how and why organizations respond to diffuse community protests, and they enrich corporate governance research on the roles of communities and stakeholders in shaping board composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes social movements successfully deter entry in contested industries? We develop a contingency framework explaining how movements' success depends on the internal fit between their private and public politics strategies with the tactics of mass and elite mobilization. We also highlight the importance of how these tactics fit with external conditions like the cognitive legitimacy of the industry and industry countermobilization. When movements rely on a private politics strategy to condemn an industry in the eyes of the public, social movement mass will be decisive. Alternatively, when movements use a public politics strategy to push for regulatory intervention, mobilization of elites is crucial. We develop our understanding of external contingency factors by exploring how cognitive legitimacy residuals from local ancestral populations affect both mass-driven private politics and elite-driven public politics, and how national-level industry countermobilization efforts affect elite-driven public politics strategies. We test these ideas in a historical study of the Scottish whisky distilling industry during the rise of temperance movements (1823–1921). We contribute to the social movements literature by showing how movements' entry deterrence in contested industries depends on the internal fit between their strategies and mobilization tactics, as well as on their engagement with external contingencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates-based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women's Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" discussion board-two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, "science fan fiction," in online spaces and (2) how gender "science fan fiction" is an outcome of the male supremacist cosmology, by producing and justifying resentment against white women as being both inherently untrustworthy (politically, sexually, intellectually) and dangerous. This perspective-which combines hatred and distrust of women with white nationalist anxieties about demographic shifts, racial integrity, and sexuality-then motivates misogynist policy ideas including total domination of women or their removal. 4chan users employ this discourse to "scientifically" substantiate claims of white male supremacy, the fundamental untrustworthiness of white women, and to argue white women's inherent threat to white male supremacist goals.

Abstract: Scientific research on the mechanisms to address global warming and its consequences continues to proliferate in the context of an accelerating climate emergency. The concept of climate action includes multiple meanings, and several types of actors employ its use to manage the crisis. The term has evolved to incorporate many of the suggested strategies to combat global warming offered by international bodies, states, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and social movements. The present work offers a classification scheme to build a shared understanding of climate action through a lens of environmental justice and just transitions developed by sociologists and others. The classification system includes major institutional and noninstitutional forms of climate action. By identifying the primary forms of climate action, analysts, scholars, policymakers, and activists can better determine levels of success and how different forms of climate action may or may not complement one another in the search for equitable solutions in turning back the rapid heating of the planet.

Abstract: For over a century, abortion has been politically and socially contested, affecting people's lives through personal experience and/or public discourse. In the United States (US), abortion is sometimes exceptional—treated differently from other procedures, professions, and political issues—and sometimes an exemplar—an accessible example of a commonly occurring social, political, or personal phenomenon. It is, in other words, an excellent sociological case study. Yet the sociological literature on abortion is relatively thin. In this essay, we review research on abortion and opportunities for future sociological work in eight areas: gender; race; the body and embodiment; political economy; organizations, occupations, and work; medical sociology; law and society; and social movements. Sociologists have much to contribute to characterizing and understanding abortion, particularly following the 2022 US Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. The discipline also has much to learn from studying abortion as a case. With its multifaceted social and political status and intersections with key areas of sociological interest, abortion offers a generative case for advancing sociological concepts, subfields, and constructs. While not exhaustive, our review aims to spark interest and inquiry, showcasing how a topic that spurs strong opinions can also catalyze sociological insights.

Proximate mechanisms of 'social ageing', i.e. shifts in social activity and narrowing of social networks, are understudied. It is proposed that energetic deficiencies (which are often seen in older individuals) may restrict movement and, in turn, sociality, but empirical tests of these intermediary mechanisms are lacking. Here, we study wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus), combining measures of faecal triiodothyronine (fT3), a non-invasive proxy for energy availability, high-resolution GPS data (movement and social proximity) and accelerometry (social grooming durations). Higher (individual mean-centred) fT3 was associated with increased residency time (i.e. remaining in the same area longer), which, in turn, was positively related to social opportunities (i.e. close physical proximity). Individuals with more frequent social opportunities received more grooming, whereas for grooming given, fT3 moderated this effect, suggesting an energetic cost of giving grooming. While our results support the spirit of the energetic deficiencies hypothesis, the directionality of the relationship between energy availability and movement is unexpected and suggests that lower-energy individuals may use strategies to reduce the costs of intermittent locomotion. Thus, future work should consider whether age-related declines in sociality may be a by-product of a strategy to conserve energy. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Understanding age and society using natural populations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: This article examines the association between ideology and firm participation in sociopolitical activism. In particular, it focuses on the ideological alignment between a firm's upper echelons and its general employees. We theorize that participation in progressive corporate activism reflects the ideological views of both the top management team and general employees. By examining firm participation in letter campaigns supporting progressive causes, our findings indicate that ideological alignment between a top management teams and general employees' liberal political leanings is associated with a firm's participation in progressive corporate activism. The CEO's own ideological preferences do not have an independent association with this kind of activism. This article concludes with a discussion of implications for our understanding of corporate political action and nonmarket strategy. Managerial Summary: This article looks at the relationship between political ideology and firm participation in sociopolitical activism. Although some have argued that firms' activism reflects a CEO's ideological preferences or employee activism, we find that neither explanation fully accounts for the kinds of companies that engage in this kind of activism. We find that progressive corporate activism reflects the ideological views of both top management and general employees. Our findings suggest that companies that have ideological alignment on progressive issues are more likely to take public stands on those issues because the stands reinforce core values held by employees and the top management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism as the newly hegemonic model for race relations in the United States. Neoliberal multiculturalism emerged in the 1990s as a model of governance that incorporates historically racialized, and or excluded groups into the political, social, and cultural institutions of power to create a more inclusive, equitable, and democratic society. It is in response to an aging White population that was rooted in historically specific regimes of racial domination, and an ever more diverse working-age population. Nonetheless, like all measures to resolve capitalist crisis, neoliberal multiculturalism has generated new contradictions. The most important being that multiculturalism alone could not resolve the principal tensions between capitalism and labor, the environment, and liberalism. Drawing on examples from ongoing research from the Inland Empire, I argue that the convergence of these historic contradictions has put multiculturalism as a project of the left at a historic impasse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study highlights an unconventional form of LGBTQIA activism within restrictive contexts in the Middle East. Building on the triangulation of data findings obtained from activists' social media accounts from 2014 until 2022, this study argues that Egyptian queer women mobilized quiet activism as a safe form of individual engagement within a repressive and anti-queer context fuelled by social disdain. Tracking women's individual life stories, this study revealed an unfamiliar strategy of action that has been overlooked by scholarship addressing the LGBTQIA advocacy as a collective action in the Middle East. While scholars have entrenched the LGBTQIA advocacy within a logic of collective activism and organized cyber/groundwork, this study underlined quiet activism as a coping mechanism with state repression in order to contest the state persecution of queer citizens and violation of individual rights and freedom. Being at the intersection of individual engagement, transformative events and personal emotions, quiet activism is an adaptive form of entanglement with repressive contexts through non-confrontational and unchallenging tools of action, such as personal encounters and emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research evaluates the extent to which 30 Black women movement actors (e.g., leaders, organizers, and protestors) narrate their intersectional experiences in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) in the District of Columbia and Maryland. Specifically, through the narratives and experiences of Black women movement actors (BWMAs) within contemporary social movements, this work uses sociological intersectionality as a theoretical conceptualization and analytical method to link misogynoir to movement literature. Misogynoir was a recurring, embedded concept that had a sustaining effect on movement goals. Also, the amount of time in movement acted as an important identifier of a structural analysis for BWMAs intersectional interpretations. Joya Misra, Celeste Vaughan Curinton, and Venus Mary Green proffer six tenets of sociological analysis that help to illuminate the tools BWMAs use to challenge local organizations to decenter male-centric goals and center women, queer, and differently abled needs for liberation, toward a more comprehensive movement. Implications for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time is a central dimension to the study of long-term visions and political generations in social movements. Yet, missing from both concepts is theorizing of activist groups' own agency in using time as a resource. I address this problem through two main contributions. First, drawing on the findings of a Grounded Theory study among two generations of feminist activism in Ecuador and Peru, I show how these constructed long-term visions through four stages: interrupting the course of gender hierarchies, getting policy change put into practice, making feminist practices accessible, and repoliticizing feminist activism. Second, I employ David Maines and colleagues' retrieval of G.H. Mead's theory of time to analyze how the two generations used time as a source of power differently in each stage, producing a shift regarding which generation was the driving force of the construction of long-term visions across the stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the extensive research on police use of social media for crisis communication, their post-crisis social media activity warrants further exploration. This paper analyses 4,177 posts from the Hong Kong Police Force's (HKPF) Facebook page from June 2018 to May 2021, covering periods before, during, and after the wave of violent protests in 2019. The study found that, during the protest movement, the HKPF's social media agenda underwent a significant shift – from serving as a public relations tool to creating an image of a crime-fighting force. This agenda persisted post-crisis, with the police demonstrating increased activity on social media during this period. At the same time, the police made efforts to restore a degree of friendly tone after the movement. The research suggests that, despite the general tendency to restore legitimacy following civil unrest, such a crisis can impact the police's perception of their relationship with citizens. Instead of reverting their social media strategy to its pre-crisis state, the crisis-era strategy could become normalised in post-crisis times. The findings of this research provide insight into how civil unrest can affect the police – citizen relationship and how the government's reaction to the crisis can shape the police's public relations strategy in the aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our main objective here is to show the methodological usefulness of philosophical ideas. Concretely, drawing on theoretical analyses related to the concept of social structuring processes (Elder-Vass) and becoming differently (Gilles Deleuze), we argue that the social struggles of Afro-Latin American women can be interrogated in their role of transforming normative identities and fostering innovative communitarian dynamics that enable adaptation and transformation. The central thesis is that embracing a social construction perspective characterised by fluidity, adaptability, and solidarity can offer an alternative philosophically grounded methodological framework capable of addressing the complexities of race, gender, and social justice in Latin America. In the context of the recent necessity to rethink mobilisation and social movements, our findings highlight the significance of structuring processes over identity differentiation and the importance of networked activities in facing systemic challenges. Ultimately, this study contributes to the possibility of moving towards more complex accounts of the plurality communitarian arrangements becoming active in the middle of reality changes and mutual efforts to deal with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate movements led by students and the youth worldwide (and in particular, those in richer economies) have been recognized as having a formidable voice and making important contributions towards a more radical societal transformation to face the climate crisis. However, little is said about the contribution of popular sectors, who have been mobilizing for decades and demanding broader structural transformations—with proposals that tackle environmental issues more broadly and the climate crisis in particular—but who are not directly involved in climate politics arenas, such as the United Nations Climate Change conferences. Usually portrayed as vulnerable, as those most affected by climate events, as victims and receivers of adaptation strategies, or, as resilient, rarely do popular sectors appear as agents of transformation. Critical scholars have advocated for understanding the climate crisis as part of multiple crises, including the biodiversity crisis, a crisis of care, and a crisis of democracy. Situating our article within this scholarship, we argue that the scholarly and societal debate on climate change will further benefit from broadening the scope of which social subjects are considered as part of the climate movement. Based on our research with rural popular feminist movements in Brazil, and in particular, the coalition Marcha das Margaridas, we address the following questions: how are their diagnostics of, and proposals to, overcome the climate crisis embedded in their broader project of transformation? Additionally, how does their political identity within class, gender, and rural categories of inequality inform their positions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the short-lived reform experiment on grassroot democracy by the District Councils of Hong Kong in 2020–2021, following the landslide victory of candidates who supported the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement of Hong Kong. It argues that the institutional positions and resources of local elections can serve as movement resources to support social and political movements, promote civic participation and community-building, and strengthen civil society. By a study of meeting documents and in-depth interviews with 50 pro-movement councillors, this paper recounted how movement activists made use of the local councils to support the movement, change funding allocation to counter clientelism, encourage grassroot participation and network with civil society. The window of political opportunity was quickly shut down with the imposition of the National Security Law for Hong Kong, but it showed the possibility of using local councils to further movement causes and grassroot democracy in a much-constrained non-democratic institutional setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising wave of protests throughout the world demands a deeper understanding of, as well as new perspectives on, the phenomenon and its impact on society. Hence, I spotlight the #EndSARS protest to understand new forms of social protest in contemporary Nigeria. In so doing, I examine how protesters mobilise religious infrastructures of prayer, music and procession to shape and sustain the protest. By focusing on prayer walk activities during the protest, I analyse how Christian music shapes the sound space and the atmosphere of local struggles. The study draws evidence from ethnography conducted during the prayer walk activities in Ibadan, Nigeria, and other archival resources including social media. By illuminating religious nuances of the #EndSARS protest that remain underexplored in scholarly and popular writings about the protest, this study provides the analytical lens to understand how people's lived religion is implicated in their everyday socio-political struggle. I argue that the prayer walk constitutes a symbolic and sonic site for Christian protesters to perform spiritual solidarity with other #EndSARS protesters through the agency of Christian music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Greenberg, who passed away in July 2024, was a pioneer of radical criminology as well as polymath who excelled in several disciplines, including physics, history, and mathematical sociology. In November 2022, I spoke with David about some research I was doing into the history of prison abolitionism in the United States. David had been the author of "The Problem of Prisons," a pamphlet written in 1969 which was one of the first sustained arguments for prison abolition to have been published in the post-war United States. He also edited and was a main contributor to The Struggle For Justice, a coauthored book published in 1971 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). This book would become a key reference in the emerging field of radical criminology and would influence early Quaker prison abolitionists like Fay Honey Knopp and Ruth Rittenhouse Morris, as well as later abolitionist groups like Critical Resistance. In his later writings, however, David was critical of prison abolitionism. 1 I was curious about how and why his views changed, so I sat down with him in a Greenwich village cafe and recorded our conversation. The following is an edited transcript of that recording. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work focuses on the lived experiences of the Tibetan refugees in order to understand their way of life dedicated to the nation's freedom, lived only through imagination and narratives. Tibetan communities living inside and outside two Tibetan settlements, Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, and Bylakuppe, Karnataka, in India, were interviewed. An analysis of 15 interviews showed that for participants, the meaning of being a true Tibetan depends on identification with the cultural and religious values specific to Tibet, perceiving their enemy as a substantial threat to Tibet's existence, and following non-violent ways to struggle for Tibet's cause. A determined sense of belonging only to a Tibet free from the atrocities of the enemy (thus not belonging to the current Tibetan Autonomous Region or anywhere else), along with challenges in exile and faith in present political strategies, motivates a phenomenon of everyday mobilization reflected in their rational life choices to free Tibet. This article contributes to a broader debate on the mobilization process for the continuity of a social movement amid statelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the mainstream economic argument that attributes Puerto Rico's economic struggles to overly generous federal welfare programs or an excessively high minimum wage. It traces the root of the island's structural economic issues to its mid-twentieth-century dependent growth strategy, pre-dating these commonly cited factors. Examining the role of Puerto Rican elites, the article argues that their vested interests in the current model could undermine a suitable industrial policy program. The article posits that the island's vibrant worker cooperative movement and Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) offer a more promising foundation for an effective industrial policy agenda. Finally, it introduces the concept of Social and Solidarity Industrial Policy as a framework for sustainable development in Puerto Rico and potentially other Global South economies, leveraging democratic state firms, worker cooperatives, and other SSE initiatives. JEL Classification: B50, L52, O54 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can recognition theories distinguish legitimate from illegitimate claims to recognition put forward by social movements? This paper identifies an under-theorised problem of recognition theories: in viewing struggles for recognition as a force for social progress in the mould of the New Social Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, existing accounts have trouble identifying and ruling out illegitimate claims to recognition as formulated by contemporary counter-movements like white supremacists or men's rights activists. I refer to this issue as the symmetry problem of recognition since it amounts to difficulties in identifying grounds for excluding illegitimate claims to recognition that do not also symmetrically justify the exclusion of legitimate ones (and vice versa). I argue that criteria for telling apart legitimate from illegitimate claims to recognition need to include interpretation issues as a dimension of analysis, which consequently requires incorporating democratic deliberation as a necessary component of recognition theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-racial and colourblind framings suggest that the racial divides of the past have been rendered obsolete, largely due to the advancements spurred by social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. However, scholars across the fields of Rhetoric, Theory, and Black Studies have shown how these framings, rather than ameliorating racial divides, have deepened them by subtly endorsing whiteness and white supremacist ideologies. This paper introduces the concept of 'Technological Progress Framing' – the belief that technology and its rapid advancements can resolve racial disparities. It argues that this framing has, in certain contexts, either repackaged or supplanted post-racial perspectives, ultimately serving the interests of whiteness. Using the 2004 film 'I, Robot', the paper elucidates how science fiction films, undergirded by this Technological Progress Framing, further anti-Black rhetoric and agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politische Vierteljahresschrift is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politische Vierteljahresschrift is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many White Americans believe that racism, racial violence, and hate groups are relics of the past, and yet we have witnessed the resurgence of White extremist groups and overt racism in recent years. This resurgence requires an examination of White extremist ideologies, particularly as they center traditional family values in justifying their extremism. In this study, we utilize a content analysis of the websites of six White extremist organizations to examine ideologies surrounding the family at the intersection of race and gender. Furthermore, we question why these ideologies take shape as they do and the potential implications of espousing family values with a rise in White extremism. Our study addresses the gender gap in existing White extremist research and highlights the need for an intersectional approach in understanding how ideologies differ between a White extremist group specifically for women and those under the leadership of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than two decades after Gregg v. Georgia (1976), use of the death penalty greatly expanded across the United States. Since 2000, however, it has declined significantly. Perhaps the most notable explanation for this decline is the contemporary focus on wrongful convictions. In this paper, we aim to contextualize the modern death penalty decline, and its connection with innocence, through the theoretical lens of social movements and collective action. We argue that dual opportunities reshaped the modern anti‐death penalty movement. First, the McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) ruling affirmed the federal courts' resistance to abolition and inspired activists to begin shifting toward state‐level political abolitionism. Activists then took advantage of the developing interest in wrongful convictions. Specifically, innocence‐related abolitionist activities in Illinois reinvigorated the anti‐death penalty movement, expanded the advocacy network, and fundamentally reframed the debate around capital punishment in the United States. We suggest that, collectively, these dual opportunities reshaped the anti‐death penalty movement into one that emphasized strategies reaching beyond constitutionality and propelled the movement into the twenty‐first century with a foundation for successful political abolitionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on territories which have long been subjected to nationalist violence has tended to focus on the most radical manifestations of these struggles and their electoral and institutional consequences. In certain configurations, the involvement of nationalist entrepreneurs in socio‐economic initiatives, environmental causes or women's mobilisations reveals a broadening of activism to a larger political scope. This broadening can contribute to diluting or, conversely, reinforcing purely nationalist demands while creating new opportunities for alliances with non‐nationalist mobilisations. The French Basque region illustrates such a discussion. Basque nationalist politics has not only taken the form of a political movement but has also constituted a culture of citizen opposition in which the nationalist demand is as much an end as support for other struggles, notably socio‐economic ones. The article adopts a socio‐historical approach by going back to the main arenas in which Basque nationalism was formed and the struggles that have shaped it. Once having defined the concept of the culture of civic opposition, the article analyses three historical sequences from the 1970s until the 2020s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the efforts of a group of squatters and Occupy activists living in a building (‘The Black Stag’) on the outskirts of London to turn their squat into a social centre. It uses autonomy as a window into debates between squatters as they confronted eviction across a range of urban struggles – the criminalization of squatting, and the eviction of Occupy London in 2012. Autonomy, I argue, has been a vital building block in the London squatters’ movement at a time when criminalization has forced its members into ever more peripheral and derelict urban spaces. However, its emphasis on freedom and decentralization has also risked intensifying political differences within the movement, as disagreements come to dominate, and internal problems eclipse the necessary work required to build and extend that autonomy across distance. As squatters look toward new formal and institutional arrangements in order to re-gain access to the city, their struggles for autonomy matter because they show us, not just why social movements fail to coalesce, but under what conditions they can be collectively assembled and made in common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2020, Minneapolis became the epicenter of a global movement challenging entrenched anti-Blackness and police violence after the murder of George Floyd, leading to demands to defund police departments and redistribute police officers’ mental health-related responsibilities to social workers. These events foregrounded dialogue about anti-carceral social work, a nascent area of social work. While empirical studies related to anti-carceral social work are lacking, this study addresses the gap by focusing on an episode in the Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement, a community-led effort to shelter hundreds of unhoused residents displaced by the National Guard during mass protests in 2020. Using constructivist grounded theory, intensive interviews with 17 organizers and volunteers were conducted centered on crisis relief efforts to create a shelter in a hotel in Minneapolis and challenges that surfaced. Results led to development of a grounded theory: Supporting Unhoused Residents in Minneapolis 2020: A Complex Path of Disillusionment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smallholder farmers are widely touted as essential to sustainable agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. But what exactly is meant by sustainable development, and how are smallholder farmers expected to contribute to it? In this perspective, we describe and assess two competing visions of sustainable development, namely Capital Theory and the Capabilities approach, paying special attention to the major yet divergent repercussions each approach implies for the future of smallholder farmers and the activities of their representative organizations. We present the core concepts, tools and practices stemming from each sustainable development perspective, and from a critique of these motivate the superiority of a capabilities approach as more conducive to smallholder farmers wellbeing now and in the future. In doing so, we bring to the fore the pivotal role smallholder farmer organizations and rural social movements, as collective vehicles for smallholder political agency, play in strategically advocating for the conditions that support sustainable and just smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop the concept of the satellite political movement (SPM), a form of movement-party interaction that emerges in support of a particular political leader. We theorize SPMs as grassroots movements that seek to empower a formal political figure by engaging in activism on that individual's behalf. Examining the cases of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, we suggest that SPMs may serve as a valuable resource for insurgent political leaders by engaging in year-round campaigning, activating new supporters, and providing political cover for more controversial tactics. We analyze social media content, legal documents, and contemporaneous reporting to illustrate the actors within SPMs, their relationships to the formal political leader they support, and three theoretical mechanisms through which SPMs may bolster political leaders: permanent campaign, radicalism by proxy, and strategic separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At times, radicalized rightwing movements may influence political institutions to the point of weakening core democratic practices and promoting the tools of autocrats. We advance a theory of social movement partyism, arguing that formal political parties and social movements may forge an alliance through a relational opportunity-mobilization exchange, whereby the party provides political opportunities to the movement and the movement offers a highly energized base of support. In this environment, elected officials will be moved to take action in the electoral arena consistent with movement goals. We use a quantitative dataset at the House District level to examine the impact of the hate movement on members of Congress voting to object to certifying the presidential election results on January 6, 2021, net of a host of individual and social contextual variables. We find Congress members from districts with high levels of hate movement organizations, especially those formed in the Trump era, were more likely to object to the election results. We provide a reliability check using a model looking at additional measures of anti-democratic activity and autocratic tools. Our results provide strong support for our contention that social movement partyism involving an extremist movement influenced recent anti-democratic and authoritarian actions on the part of elected officials in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractSince the end of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests, Hong Kong has experienced rapid autocratisation. While many pro-democracy citizens had opted for exit and emigrated, even more had stayed. How do pro-democracy citizens in Hong Kong respond to the political changes? In what ways do they adapt to the new political environment? And to what extent are they holding onto their values and beliefs? To answer such questions, this article develops the concept of adaptive resilience, compares it with other possible responses to autocratisation, and specifies an approach to empirically differentiate among the various responses. It then utilises a survey of the Anti-ELAB protesters conducted in February 2023 to demonstrate the presence of adaptive resilience among this group of pro-democracy citizens. Specifically, former protesters exhibited a significant degree of adaptation to the changing political reality. Yet, adaptation is associated with critical judgments, pro-democracy values, value-expressive behaviours, the Hongkonger identity, and intention to remember the Anti-ELAB protests. The analysis also illustrates the role of social support – represented by social trust, network homogeneity, and frequency of social gatherings – in building adaptive resilience. Implications of the findings on democratic resilience in Hong Kong are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a vision and being able to imagine socially and ecologically just alternatives can motivate people for societal transformation. However, which psychological processes drive this link between the mental accessibility of societal alternatives and collective action? We hypothesized that collective efficacy beliefs and politicized identification form two pathways mediating the effects of cognitive alternatives on high‐cost activist behaviour. Two studies and a pooled analysis tested these hypotheses longitudinally. Data were collected in two field settings: a climate camp and an online conference on socio‐ecological visions. In line with our assumptions, and across three of the four analysed timeframes, latent change score modelling showed that changes in cognitive alternatives predicted changes in collective efficacy beliefs and social movement identification, which in turn, predicted changes in collective action intentions. We found clear evidence for our hypotheses in the short term and mixed evidence in the long term. Additional analyses including participative efficacy showed no relevant effects. We concluded that the ability to envision social change may foster a sense of agency as members of social movements. These processes linking imagination to activism are less about individual efficacy than about realizing the collective possibilities for change and identifying with the groups enacting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Created by street artist Shepard Fairey, the protest poster, “We the People are Greater than Fear,” emerged as a powerful visual response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Though celebrated as a progressive symbol of inclusion, we argue the poster, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces some of the very prejudices it seeks to confront by associating Muslimness with suspicion, foreignness, and fear. Using “Greater than Fear” as a case study, this essay contributes to scholarship combining critical affect theory with rhetorical studies by theorizing affective blockage as a means of understanding the ways affect contributes to the resilience of hegemonic narratives by preventing certain meanings from surfacing. We argue the poster reveals a cautionary lesson about how affect can obscure critique of cultural texts created with progressive intent, inadvertently bolstering softer, more subtle forms of racism embedded in liberal contexts. We also discuss the importance of interrogating rehearsed affective associations that, by virtue of their familiarity, seem normal and acceptable but ultimately reinforce exploitative conceptions related to identity categories such as race, religion, sexuality, class, and gender. We conclude with insights for rhetorical scholars about how affective associations can enable ostensibly liberal discourses while at the same time preventing their critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Re-imagining the Global South: perspectives from the South Atlantic" delves into Paul Gilroy's book "The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness," which explores the intricate relationships between slavery, identity, culture, and race across the Atlantic Ocean. It highlights the significance of Afro-diasporic populations in shaping modern society and calls for a broader consideration of the South Atlantic in discussions of Blackness and modernity. The text underscores the need for further research and dialogue to deepen our understanding of the interconnected histories and experiences of Africa and Latin America, challenging conventional narratives and promoting diverse perspectives. Various academic works and research projects are showcased to encourage a more inclusive and interconnected approach to studying the South Atlantic region. [Extracted from the article]

This paper aims to shed light on the key role of digital repertoire in shaping participation forms, challenging internet as a flexible, dynamic, and pervasive platform that transcends reality in terms of sense and relationship construction processes. The research design traces the narration and performance patterns in the last decade of the No Tav movement case study. The work examines the concept of innovation as both an evolving repertoire and a set of users’ practices. The empirical analysis is conducted through digital content analysis using quantitative textual analysis techniques. The research questions aim to understand how activists produce and share knowledge, what mobilization patterns emerge and are enabled by digital media, and how organizational assumptions change due to the digital turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]