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This paper offers elaborations on current knowledge about social-movement framing processes and cognitive liberation, especially regarding technical controversies and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) protest. The social-constructionist lens of the framing perspective also allows refinements in conventional explanations of NIMBY conflicts. Attention is given to the dynamics of emergence, continuity, and change in framing strategies over time in controversy regarding the U.S. Army's chemical-weapons disposal program. I focus specifically on dynamics involved in the development of cognitive liberation, particularly the framing difficulties that occur in the context of cognitive ambiguities produced by an "information haze." These ambiguities create problems for developing and linking the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational elements of collective-action frames. I also attend to frame transformation, explaining how transformation may be both animated and constrained by a movement's opponent. I conclude that NIMBY is only one possible framing and can be transformed as the context of the dispute shifts. Moreover, framing activities in technical disputes may be particularly difficult due to the role of scientific rhetoric and experts in interpreting risks and shaping understandings of the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing recent research and monographs from participants and observers, this paper reports on the underanalyzed Vietnam antiwar movement. Key events are placed in a historical context that help to explain the origins of the movement. Particular attention is given to the various responses of the state to the challengers and the complex interrelationships with the media. As the antiwar movement grew and developed, there were multiple factors that contributed to solidarity and factionalism within the movement. Despite state repressive actions and internal factionalism, the movement was successful in helping to end the war. The effects on U.S. policies were more indirect than direct. The antiwar movement mobilized millions of citizens to public protest. The demonstrations helped to shift public opinion away from supporting the war and activated third parties to question and demand an end to war policies. The political system did respond to the antiwar movement’s demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from an intensive study of Boston's antebellum black community to demonstrate how sustained social activism is embedded in the formal and informal institutions of the community. The social networks of cooperative institutions were primary factors in this community's ability to mobilize and sustain protest actions and to call attention to social injustice. This examination of antebellum black Boston indicates that the issue of slavery was crucial to social activism. This suggests that the presence of a salient issue which links the everyday lives of participants with a public issue may be an important factor in building a social movement based in a poor, relatively powerless community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis explores men's role exit process from being married to divorced in the context of the alimony reform movement in the United States. Those considering potential role exit may face governmental policies that either support or oppose them in making these personal changes. In this case, mostly men want to leave their husband roles behind but legally imposed alimony, in their view, unfairly binds them to their former spouses. This analysis uses 182 narratives to map out how major collective action frames—based upon the highly valued, masculine concept of autonomy—are generated in this social movement. Overall, this research demonstrates the importance of both considering the operation of governmental policies in producing successful or incomplete role exit for individuals, and how these same individuals can respond using collective action frames drawn from privileged notions of masculinity as they aim for significant life change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has pointed to the rise of socially conscious consumption and of lifestyle movements or social movements that focus on changing one's everyday lifestyle choices as a form of protest. Much of this research addresses how adults maintain socially conscious consumption practices. Using interviews with youths who are vegan-strict vegetarians who exclude all animal products from their diet and lifestyle-I isolate the factors influencing recruitment into and retention of veganism as a lifestyle movement. I show that initial recruitment requires learning, reflection, and identity work, and that subsequent retention requires two factors: social support from friends and family, and cultural tools that provide the skills and motivation to maintain lifestyle activism. I also show how participation in the punk subculture further facilitated these processes. This work contributes to studies of youth subcultures and social movements by showing how the two intersect in lifestyle movement activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to extend our understanding of the forces that shape social movement messages. Using a framework that focuses on a movement's discursive field, I analyze the U.S. movement for population stabilization, which is made up of groups that call for stricter limits on immigration to the United States as a means to forestall environmental decline. Drawing upon data from a range of sources, including the Web sites of 10 environment-oriented immigration-reduction organizations, I make the case that this movement's particular field is composed of the discursive repertoires (or messages) of a set of environmental and nonenvironmental social actors and three central discourses: science, political economy, and nationalism. I argue that the movement's relative lack of success is partially attributable to its position in the discursive field in which it must operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between feminism and motherhood as it plays out in the construction of feminist identities. Central to this study is the conception of motherhood as a historically constructed ideology that provides a gendered model of behavior for women. In the organizations studied, the author finds that motherhood is interpreted two ways: as a social status with political ramifications and as the act of caring and taking responsibility for relationships. Early in the second wave of United States feminism, activists identified motherhood as a target for transformation and reevaluation. Some feminists framed motherhood as an essentially positive experience, damaged by patriarchal constraints that devalued women's work. Other feminists criticized motherhood as the basis of women's oppression. In this study this author examines the relationship between motherhood and feminism in a social movement context. Motherhood as a historically constructed ideology provides a gendered model of behavior for all women, even those who have not given birth or raised children.

The article evaluates the effects of types of racial and class attitudes on assessments of the desirability of residential integration in Atlanta, Georgia. From the early 1900s until 1 908, racial segregation was a legal and wide-spread form of residential organization. Segregation existed because White social customs prescribed it, political structures permitted it, and legal and extra-legal actions enforced it . Among the many achievements of the African American civil rights movement was the abolition of "de jure" segregation via the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Yet in spite of this legislation, and despite the decline both in Whites' stated resistance to integration and in levels of segregation over the last few decades, African Americans in most American cities remain spatially separated from Whites. A small but influential group of scholars stresses the role of nonjudgmental preferences for the racial composition of neighborhoods in perpetuating segregation. In this view, since Whites and African Americans share a "morally innocent mutual ethnocentrism" neighborhoods eventually become composed primarily of one group or another. In several studies, African Americans have reported preferences for neighborhoods that are at least 50% African Americans while Whites say they would be most comfortable in neighborhoods that are 0% to 30% minority show that even small differences in preferences can lead to extreme degrees of segregation.

Results of a survey of participants in the April, 1979 antinuclear demonstration in San Francisco arc compared to those obtained from a similar study of participants in the May, 1979 antinuclear demonstration in Washington, D.C. Both sets of demonstrators arc found to be young, well-educated and politically liberal, and to reject several dominant American values. The similarity in findings between the two studies provides increased confidence in our understanding of the social composition of the antinuclear movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]