Search

This study examined the role of public relations in Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony, specifically in a counterhegemony. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s preparation for the 1968 Poor People's Campaign serves as a test case on how public relations can help subordinate groups confront a hegemony. This paper suggests that Gramsci's philosophy provides an analytical heuristic for researching instances of contestation. Examining counterhegemonic campaigns offer public relations practitioners a means both to think about and to intervene in the world more effectively. • Antonio Gramsci postulated principles for how to conduct a counterhegemony. • Counterhegemony needs a multifrontal approach and a unifying, master frame. • The 1968 Poor People's Campaign was used to study the role of PR in counterhegemony. • Study shows counterhegemony also needs long term planning to overcome fixed beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Climate movements can permeate discourses around global climate change negotiations. • Youth climate activists have demonstrated moral power, shifting debates. • Computational analysis of Twitter data 2014–2021 suggests normative change. • Activists as norm entrepreneurs rely on norm champions for global normative change. • Global norms such as anti-fossil fuel norms and climate justice are on the rise. Youth Climate Activists are important norm entrepreneurs as humanity is increasingly awakening to the realities of accelerating climate change. They push for seeing climate change not merely through cost-benefit analysis frames but through frames of multiple climate justices. But how successful have these activists been in shifting perspectives in the context of international climate politics? This paper aims to investigate (1) to what extent the normative framework advanced by this movement is increasingly penetrating the international public climate debate, changing arguments, priorities, and frames around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and (2) the key actors pushing for normative change. Using a unique and comprehensive Twitter dataset for the period between 2014 and 2021 revolving around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and major youth climate protest events we combine various computational methods, including transformers-based topic modelling and social network analysis in this study. We find that indeed the normative framework advanced by the movement has successfully penetrated the discourse around UNFCCC and that youth climate activists were able gain support from central actors outside the movement, which is further contributing to the diffusion of their normative framework. We conclude that while these results demonstrate the moral power of youth climate activists, more research is needed to understand the influence on the actual negotiations outcomes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On September 26, 2014, Mexico police forces ambushed several student buses from a rural teachers college in southwestern Mexico, killed several and abducted forty-three others. These forty-three have not been seen since and now pertain to the country's bulging numbers of the forcibly disappeared. All of the students were young men studying at a rural teaching college, called a Normal School, and they are typically referred to as "normalistas" (student-teachers). Within a week of this massacre/disappearance, protests erupted across the country to demand their "live return" and to inspire international support of a growing social justice movement. In support of the activism, Mexican artist-activists organized an exhibition and catalog of political posters submitted from around the world. In this paper, I use a critical geographic lens to frame a discussion of these posters, and of the political poster as an activist artform more generally, as I examine them within the many paradoxes that activists navigate in their struggles at the nexus of racism, misogyny, and neoliberal terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative approach to the scholarship of activist public relations, based on the ideas of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; notably his understanding of activism in society. Although Bourdieu is one of the most quoted sociologists in the world ( Santoro, 2011 ; Truong & Weill, 2012 ), his work has only received limited attention in public relations, and has been entirely ignored within the context of activist communication. This is despite his focus on power, relationships and the role of activists in modern democracies, all of which are central themes in public relations practice and research. Based on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the discipline’s prevailing, dominant, industry serving, functionalist paradigm positions public relations’ role in society as to perpetuate social inequalities. However, drawing on his ideas leads us to question if public relations skills could be equally utilized to challenge existing power imbalances in society, either in support or on behalf of those groups and individuals whose voices have been drowned out by traditional public relations efforts. The author argues that Bourdieu was not only an accomplished scholar, but also an activist in his own right. It is this combination of personal experience with academic ideas that lends weight to his scholarly work through which he urged the scholarly community to utilize their skills, knowledge and research to challenge (perceived) inequalities in society. The emergence of this type of activist academic , committed to giving voice to multiple coexisting, sometimes directly competing points of views, would arguably further justify and strengthen the existence of public relations as a scholarly discipline in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The membership of British political parties has a direct influence on their political effectiveness. This paper applies the mathematics of epidemiology to the analysis of the growth and decline of such memberships. The party members are divided into activists and inactive members, where all activists influence the quality of party recruitment, but only a subset of activists recruit and thus govern numerical growth. The activists recruit for only a limited period, which acts as a restriction on further party growth. This Limited Activist model is applied to post-war and recent memberships of the Labour, Scottish National and Conservative parties. The model reproduces data trends, and relates realistically to historical narratives. It is concluded that the political parties analysed are not in danger of extinction but experience repeated periods of growth and decline in membership, albeit at lower numbers than in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social context is a vitally important concept to political geographers, but one that suffers from measurement problems and ambiguities of definition, particularly at the most localized levels of measurement. In this paper, we argue that unique insights about context can be gained by combining the tools of survey research with the geographic tools of spatial analysis. By spatially interpolating indicators of neighborhood-level political discussion from egocentric network batteries, we capture meaningful variation in micro-level political environments. Focusing on three activist-driven measures of the political environment, we demonstrate that these measures pass key validity tests and improve model fit compared to unit-invariant measures of social context. We conclude by discussing the practical considerations and challenges associated with this measurement strategy and discuss other, more general dimensions of social context that might be captured utilizing this methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we critically explore the use of photovoice with a group of women anti-mining activists in the city of Cajamarca, Northern Peru, in order to understand the opportunities and challenges that the photovoice method presents for research with activists. We begin with an overview of participatory photography and photovoice approaches, before outlining the specific context of this research and providing a detailed methodological discussion of the photovoice process and the practical and ethical considerations of using this approach with women activists. We critically analyse the ways in which using photovoice with activists raises a particular set of issues to be negotiated in relation to access, ethical considerations, and the competing agendas of activists and researchers. We situate these debates in relation to existing literature on the use of participatory photography and photovoice in the global South, especially with women, and speak to broader literatures on researching activism and activists. We argue that participatory photography provides important opportunities for co-production of knowledge in research with social movement activists, and has a valuable role to play in enabling participants' own agendas to shape the research process and outputs, but also recognise the particular challenges that are presented by using this approach with women activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]