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The article discusses the rise of "climate projects," which are purposeful responses to climate change undertaken by individuals, groups, or institutions. These projects range from individual actions to national policies and can involve concrete changes or future plans. Sociologists are well-suited to study climate projects and can examine issues such as social inequalities, democratic politics, culture, and knowledge and expertise. The study of climate projects can provide insights into how people respond to climate change and inform public deliberations on climate action. [Extracted from the article]

What determines the quality of coverage received by social movement organizations when they appear extensively in the news? Research on the news coverage of social movement organizations is dominated by case studies supporting the “protest paradigm,” which argues that journalists portray movement activists trivially and negatively when covering protest. However, movement organizations often make long‐running news for many different reasons, mainly not protest. We argue that some of this extensive news will lead to worse coverage—in terms of substance and sentiment—notably when the main action covered involves violence. Extensive coverage centered on other actions, however, notably politically assertive action, will tend to produce “good news” in these dimensions. We analyze the news of the twentieth century's 100 most‐covered U.S. movement organizations in their biggest news year in four national newspapers. Topic models indicate that these organizations were mainly covered for actions other than nonviolent protest, including politically assertive action, strikes, civic action, investigations, trials, and violence. Natural language processing analyses and hand‐coding show that their news also varied widely in sentiment and substance. Employing qualitative comparative analyses, we find that the main action behind news strongly influences its quality, and there may be several news paradigms for movement organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian regimes are known to repress the political activity of their diasporas transnationally by threatening harsh sanctions. But is this their only mode of transnational repression? This article builds on scholarship on social control to explore whether migrants bring internalized forms of political repression from their authoritarian home country to their democratic country of settlement—and if so, how it shapes their transnational political activity. In‐depth life‐history interviews with 29 U.S.‐citizen and permanent‐resident Syrian immigrants living in Los Angeles, California and Louisville, Kentucky reveal that for many U.S.‐based Syrians, demobilizing emotions, interpretive frames, and habits learned in Syria depressed their transnational political activity during the Arab Spring. Four internalized mechanisms of transnational political repression are conceptualized: learned helplessness, chronic fear of politics and the State, political trauma, and disciplined aversion to political expression. Leveraging comparisons between activists, demobilized activists, and non‐activists, this article demonstrates the connections between specific political socialization experiences, internalized political repression, and transnational political (in)activity. This article contributes to the growing literature on constraints and barriers to transnational mobilization, and to the debate over the role of pre‐migration political experience on immigrants' political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines my environmental health work for nearly four decades with many environmental activists and organizations, as well as scientists and government officials. I discuss how I have merged research and advocacy, while mentoring many students and colleagues on how to do that. I discuss my efforts to conduct transdisciplinary work that crosses social sciences, environmental health science, environmental justice, social movement studies, and science and technology studies, while centering that work on community‐based participatory research. I examine my ability to do the practical work of serving public health and the broader social good, while also developing theoretical and analytical concepts along the way. I discuss the importance of continually being reflective about these many areas of work, both personal reflexivity and reflexive, evaluative discussions with collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anchored in Mannheim's theory, the concept of political generations captures how new movement recruits respond to shifting political contexts and become agents of change within a social movement. A key challenge when using this concept in generational analyses is to link context with agency. In this article, I make this link by focusing on the interactions between political contexts and movement agency. My study among two generations of feminist activism in Ecuador and Peru found that both cohorts interacted with two sociopolitical conditions—prevailing gender relations and notions of political action—when they were initially mobilized. These interactions took different forms for each cohort, thereby shaping their distinct understandings and practices of feminist activism, and continuing to have consequences for movement goals, strategies, and relationships overtime. For the earlier generation, which became active between the late 1970s and early 1990s, consequences meant practicing militancy to achieve goals, deploying vanguardism to execute a comprehensive strategy, and exerting autonomy to manage the actions of the powerful. I theorize the interactions between movement agency and political contexts as a mesostructure, where process and structure meet, thereby providing a more comprehensive account of the mechanism of change bringing about political generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements must find ways to intensify their efforts to maintain political relevance—and potential influence. But escalation comes with risks in the potential reactions from authorities, supporters, potential supporters, and opponents. I argue that recognizing two elements of escalation can help. First, we need to acknowledge that movements are not unitary actors and that a large movement cannot always stop putative allies from escalating in risky ways. Second, I argue that scholars and activists can do better in making sense of the dynamics of escalation by disaggregating three dimensions of aggression by tactics, claims, and venues, assessing the range of responses to escalation on each of these dimensions. Social movement organizers face continual pressure to find ways to escalate, but responses from authorities and allies can provide a brake on escalation. I illustrate my arguments with reference to contemporary movements of the left and right in the United States and conclude by discussing the importance (and danger) of certain government responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to and reflects on the arguments made by Charles Bosk in the introduction to The Price of Perfection: The Cost of Error, written from the perspective of a former sociology doctoral student of his who now works in academic medicine. The author highlights two innovative and persuasive threads running through Bosk's work critiquing the patient safety social movement: (1) the consequence of the social constructedness of medical error and safety solutions, and (2) the importance of the personal, relational, and social dimensions of occupational rituals in clinical practice. The legacy of Bosk's work and impact beyond sociology is considered. The author demonstrates the enduring value of his insights and the impact they can have on current debates about how to transform clinical practice to reduce patient harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anchored in Mannheim's theory, the concept of political generations captures how new movement recruits respond to shifting political contexts and become agents of change within a social movement. A key challenge when using this concept in generational analyses is to link context with agency. In this article, I make this link by focusing on the interactions between political contexts and movement agency. My study among two generations of feminist activism in Ecuador and Peru found that both cohorts interacted with two sociopolitical conditions—prevailing gender relations and notions of political action—when they were initially mobilized. These interactions took different forms for each cohort, thereby shaping their distinct understandings and practices of feminist activism, and continuing to have consequences for movement goals, strategies, and relationships overtime. For the earlier generation, which became active between the late 1970s and early 1990s, consequences meant practicing militancy to achieve goals, deploying vanguardism to execute a comprehensive strategy, and exerting autonomy to manage the actions of the powerful. I theorize the interactions between movement agency and political contexts as a mesostructure, where process and structure meet, thereby providing a more comprehensive account of the mechanism of change bringing about political generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines my environmental health work for nearly four decades with many environmental activists and organizations, as well as scientists and government officials. I discuss how I have merged research and advocacy, while mentoring many students and colleagues on how to do that. I discuss my efforts to conduct transdisciplinary work that crosses social sciences, environmental health science, environmental justice, social movement studies, and science and technology studies, while centering that work on community‐based participatory research. I examine my ability to do the practical work of serving public health and the broader social good, while also developing theoretical and analytical concepts along the way. I discuss the importance of continually being reflective about these many areas of work, both personal reflexivity and reflexive, evaluative discussions with collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements must find ways to intensify their efforts to maintain political relevance—and potential influence. But escalation comes with risks in the potential reactions from authorities, supporters, potential supporters, and opponents. I argue that recognizing two elements of escalation can help. First, we need to acknowledge that movements are not unitary actors and that a large movement cannot always stop putative allies from escalating in risky ways. Second, I argue that scholars and activists can do better in making sense of the dynamics of escalation by disaggregating three dimensions of aggression by tactics, claims, and venues, assessing the range of responses to escalation on each of these dimensions. Social movement organizers face continual pressure to find ways to escalate, but responses from authorities and allies can provide a brake on escalation. I illustrate my arguments with reference to contemporary movements of the left and right in the United States and conclude by discussing the importance (and danger) of certain government responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movement against democratic backsliding in Israel was perhaps the most powerful social movement that Israel has seen, spanning over 3 months. It is credited with halting the right‐wing coalition's anti‐democratic constitutional and judicial reforms. The paper analyzes and highlights key factors in the origins, protest, and outcome stages of the movement. The movement is interesting in how experiences and personal challenges of negative emotions were addressed and overcome by protesting. The movement is also marked by a strategy that helped separate local protest initiatives to coalesce into national disruption events. The most effective forms of pressure are analyzed: resistance headquarters, direct pressures on politicians, pressures by army veteran volunteers, the public involvement of experts, favorable media coverage, and pressures from international players. The movement's impact on stopping the legislation and turning public opinion against the government coalition is finally observed, alongside suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of behaviour, choice, and action have long presented an "act" as a kind of bottleneck of meaning‐making, where the action is either a cocktail of partial preferences or the survival of one over the rest. I argue that action is often something very (if subtly) different and propose "ambivalent action" as a category of moral action defined by the actor's conflicting intentions, in which the conflict is reified (not resolved) by the act. Situated in past and contemporary context, the term is an interdisciplinary bridge, with links from classical (if vague) theoretic treatments of "ambivalence" to new sociological analogies in the realm of quantum physics. I explore this duality through the case study of #BlackoutTuesday, a social media movement connected with global protests against police brutality and racism. The black square that characterized the movement is best understood as ambivalent action, as an act of two‐fold narrative‐making: "both" silence and speech. The "success" of an ambivalent action in remaining in two narratives at once is determined by the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of behaviour, choice, and action have long presented an "act" as a kind of bottleneck of meaning‐making, where the action is either a cocktail of partial preferences or the survival of one over the rest. I argue that action is often something very (if subtly) different and propose "ambivalent action" as a category of moral action defined by the actor's conflicting intentions, in which the conflict is reified (not resolved) by the act. Situated in past and contemporary context, the term is an interdisciplinary bridge, with links from classical (if vague) theoretic treatments of "ambivalence" to new sociological analogies in the realm of quantum physics. I explore this duality through the case study of #BlackoutTuesday, a social media movement connected with global protests against police brutality and racism. The black square that characterized the movement is best understood as ambivalent action, as an act of two‐fold narrative‐making: "both" silence and speech. The "success" of an ambivalent action in remaining in two narratives at once is determined by the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this in mind, I congratulate Chancer for taking on this job and laying out an analysis of where feminism has been and where it needs to go. After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back a Revolution. Written in the time of #MeToo and other movements, Chancer lays out a careful argument of where feminism has been and what still needs to be accomplished. [Extracted from the article]

How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at "red schools" (rather than "blue schools") in Republican‐leaning areas of the country. However, other scholars argue that both Republican and Democratic student groups should be similar in their overall prevalence and located at a similar set of "engaged schools" (as opposed to "unengaged schools"). Analyzing our original database of Republican and Democratic student organizations across 1,953 four‐year, not‐for‐profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that Republican student groups are nearly as common as Democratic student groups: Republican student groups can be found at 39% of campuses, while Democratic student groups are present on 40% of campuses. Employing binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then show that Republican and Democratic student groups tend to be located at the same types of schools, that is, larger, wealthier, public schools that offer political science majors. Our article holds significant implications for theorizing on student organization presence more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at "red schools" (rather than "blue schools") in Republican‐leaning areas of the country. However, other scholars argue that both Republican and Democratic student groups should be similar in their overall prevalence and located at a similar set of "engaged schools" (as opposed to "unengaged schools"). Analyzing our original database of Republican and Democratic student organizations across 1,953 four‐year, not‐for‐profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that Republican student groups are nearly as common as Democratic student groups: Republican student groups can be found at 39% of campuses, while Democratic student groups are present on 40% of campuses. Employing binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then show that Republican and Democratic student groups tend to be located at the same types of schools, that is, larger, wealthier, public schools that offer political science majors. Our article holds significant implications for theorizing on student organization presence more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States across the Global South have witnessed historic privatization of their migration systems over the last few decades. This article explores the cultural and cognitive processes through which migrants make sense of and navigate a broker‐centric migration system. Based on 224 interviews and 15 months of fieldwork across Vietnam—a country whose migration system is reliant on migrant brokers—this article examines how migrants develop and deploy broker wisdom, a unique cultural schema, where migrants refashion migrant brokerage activity to be more legible and subsequently manipulable. I first show how migrants mobilize distinct forms of everyday resistance to make sense of and navigate migrant brokerage. I then explore how the development and deployment of broker wisdom have implications for migrant brokerage and Vietnam's broader migration project. This article contributes to international migration, economic sociology, social movements, cultural sociology, and labor scholarships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement studies have addressed the issue of nostalgia within two perspectives, focusing, respectively, on emotions and on memory. Our contribution looks at nostalgia in social movements by building upon the combination of these two streams in social movement studies. Going beyond a stereotypical vision of reactionary movements as backward looking and progressive ones as forward looking, we will suggest that while both types of movements look at some aspects of the past with nostalgia, they do it in a very different combination of emotions and memory. To compare how different movements perform their emotional and memory work, we focused on the recent uprising in Lebanon as a critical case in which mobilizations and counter‐mobilizations have been carried out by different actors at the same time. In both cases, nostalgia was strategically developed for different moments of Lebanon's history through the movements' choices of the very spaces for the performance of contentious acts, but also the symbolic meaning attributed to them and the emotional work performed around the protest events. By developing a "tick description" of some main contentious moments where nostalgia emerged in the Lebanon uprisings, we aim to understand the ways in which nostalgia intervenes in the social construction of memories and counter‐memories, in an emotionally dense environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the changing nationalist narratives of golden age in the Balkans. By zooming in on the case studies of the late nineteenth‐ and early twenty‐first‐century South‐East European societies, I explain how and why the images of the mythical past are articulated differently in the two historical periods. I argue that in the nineteenth century golden age rhetoric was mostly a top‐down phenomenon centered on transforming Balkan peasantry into the loyal members of their new nation‐states. By the early twenty‐first century, this process has reached its institutional limits and the golden age narratives have become a bottom‐up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. I focus on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalisms. The paper is based on the qualitative text analysis using nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century archival materials and the documents from the contemporary mass media, official records, educational materials, and popular culture in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States across the Global South have witnessed historic privatization of their migration systems over the last few decades. This article explores the cultural and cognitive processes through which migrants make sense of and navigate a broker‐centric migration system. Based on 224 interviews and 15 months of fieldwork across Vietnam—a country whose migration system is reliant on migrant brokers—this article examines how migrants develop and deploy broker wisdom, a unique cultural schema, where migrants refashion migrant brokerage activity to be more legible and subsequently manipulable. I first show how migrants mobilize distinct forms of everyday resistance to make sense of and navigate migrant brokerage. I then explore how the development and deployment of broker wisdom have implications for migrant brokerage and Vietnam's broader migration project. This article contributes to international migration, economic sociology, social movements, cultural sociology, and labor scholarships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Scott W. Allard b is the Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Social Policy at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington. His research interests are situated at the intersection of cultural sociology, medical sociology, phenomenology, and the sociology of the senses. B Donatella Della Porta b is a professor of political science, founding dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and Director of the PhD program in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, where she also leads the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). [Extracted from the article]

Following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 and inspired by the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, in June 2020 a wave of protest events spread across Europe as well. Based on in‐depth interviews with key informants involved in the BLM campaign and a systematic mapping of protest events, the article analyses the diffusion of the Black Lives Matter movement campaign in Italy. We investigate the conditions for the diffusion, by considering the resonance of the protests in a time of backlash and pandemic; the channels of diffusion, namely mechanisms of thin diffusion linked to the instantaneous exchange of protest content; and the effects of diffusion, in terms of recontextualization of ideas and narratives from the United States to the Italian context, the emergence of new antiracist organizations and intersectional frames that point at Italian colonialism and structural racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clair points out that based on prior studies of culture and inequality, we would expect poor and working-class defendants of color to be more deferential to authority and acquiescent in the court room, compared to privileged, white defendants who we would expect to be more vocal and assertive. Yet Clair observes the opposite dynamic in the court room, where not only are the most disadvantaged defendants more likely to use legal knowledge to assert themselves than privileged defendants, but this assertion is more likely to be punished. By centering much of the book on the stories of these defendants, painful stories of unimaginable injustice, Clair makes these subjectivities legible. [Extracted from the article]

Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call "counter‐clinical spaces." Counter‐clinical spaces are medicalized sites of knowledge production and practice that are produced through social movements' contestations with biomedicine. Other examples include sexual assault nurse examiner programs, LGBT health centers, and sexual health clinics. Counter‐clinical spaces are "counter" and "clinical" in several ways. First, these spaces are distinctly clinical in that they intervene in the health of the body. Second, these spaces are counter‐clinical in that they are organized in critique of dominant medical practices. Crucially, counter‐clinical spaces engage the clinical encounter as a site of transformation: social movement actors target clinicians' deployment of medical power, especially in their interactions with marginalized persons. We thus attend to the scale upon which social movements make a change in and against medicine, and we highlight how social movement logics can and do change practices even when they are unable to shift structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call "counter‐clinical spaces." Counter‐clinical spaces are medicalized sites of knowledge production and practice that are produced through social movements' contestations with biomedicine. Other examples include sexual assault nurse examiner programs, LGBT health centers, and sexual health clinics. Counter‐clinical spaces are "counter" and "clinical" in several ways. First, these spaces are distinctly clinical in that they intervene in the health of the body. Second, these spaces are counter‐clinical in that they are organized in critique of dominant medical practices. Crucially, counter‐clinical spaces engage the clinical encounter as a site of transformation: social movement actors target clinicians' deployment of medical power, especially in their interactions with marginalized persons. We thus attend to the scale upon which social movements make a change in and against medicine, and we highlight how social movement logics can and do change practices even when they are unable to shift structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]