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College students and campuses have played key roles in social movements because colleges' cultural and structural features tend to facilitate movements. But such attributes vary across campuses. This quantitative study models how two campus features that correspond to core elements of social movement theory—students' collective identity strength and social network density—appear to impact United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) groups' presence and success on 1,265 US 4‐year public and private nonprofit campuses during 2000–2006, operationalizing success as schools' joining the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) monitoring organization. Results generally indicate that collective identity strength and network density promote USAS presence and that network density facilitates WRC membership. USAS presence is pivotal, though not required, for WRC membership. Our logistic regression models also confirm that campus opportunity structures and off‐campus movement actors' roles help account for these USAS outcomes; notably, antiunion location ("Right‐to‐Work" states) undermines and Roman Catholic school affiliation encourages USAS presence and success. We identify theoretically why certain factors may promote only some forms of student activism (e.g., conscience constituent but not beneficiary‐based groups). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the process of co-producing an animated film about the migration journeys of Colombian women resident in Antofagasta, Chile. It first establishes the relationship between feminist epistemologies and arts-based methodologies, which hinges on embodiment. It then turns to a detailed discussion of using film co-production as a research method for accessing and expressing embodied experiences of migration. This discussion highlights how moments of discomfort (Gokariksel, Hawkins, Neubert, and Smith, 2021) experienced by the researcher motivated the search for a more collaborative methodological approach that was better attuned to lived experience. This included striving towards more inclusive practices with respect to recruitment, anonymity, and confidentiality. Moments of discomfort also revealed how care and caring responsibilities are entangled with research, and how they gender possibilities of participation and production for community co-producers and artists, as well as for researchers. Finally, through discomfort, lessons were learned about the politics of representing experiences of migration, violence, and endurance, as well as joy. The paper concludes that, whilst by no means a panacea, collaborative arts-based research methods can offer an innovative toolset for exploring embodied experience and for navigating the relational and representational complexities attendant to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the influence of civil society participation on income inequality, a topic that has received limited scholarly attention. Civil society participation refers to the activities of citizens who organize into various groups, known as civil society organizations, to pursue common interests and goals. These organizations span a wide range, including interest groups, labor unions, spiritual bodies engaging in civic or political activities, social movements, professional associations, charities, and other nongovernmental entities. Our research utilizes an extensive panel dataset, encompassing a global sample of countries from 1975 to 2019. We aim to comprehensively analyze the direct effects of civil society participation on income inequality. Our findings reveal that higher levels of civil society participation are effective in reducing inequality over the short, medium, and long term. These results have significant implications for policymakers. They suggest that encouraging and facilitating civil society participation could be a viable strategy for addressing income inequality. By understanding the dynamics of how civil society engagement influences economic disparities, policymakers can better design and implement measures that promote more equitable economic outcomes. This research contributes to the broader discourse on economic inequality and the potential role of civil society in mitigating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a distinctive strategic model (Strategic Confrontational and Collaborative Interaction Model [SCCIM]) for nonprofit organizations acting within the business ecosystem. The SCCIM maps both confrontational and collaborative strategies and tactics, thus accommodating the extensive range of nonprofit interaction alternatives toward business. Whereas confrontational and collaborative methods are well researched in the nonprofit-political realm, a comprehensive overview of these nonprofit strategies in the economic sphere is currently lacking. This research builds on both the business management and social movement literature, extending existing approaches via case analysis with a nonprofit-centric perspective, leveraging stakeholder theory. The resulting encompassing model provides a theoretical framework that may generate alternative insights for further academic research in nonprofit–business interaction. In addition, the SCCIM may be leveraged as a tool for practitioners: first, to enhance nonprofits' strategies and tactics toward business, and second, to optimize the impact of the chosen interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social justice movements, protests, marches, and direct action are collective events including many people. Although organizers should carefully plan the goals and strategies of these actions broadly, and behavior analysts have made significant progress to systems level analyses of social and cultural practices, it is important to continue to include analyses of the individuals involved and how the contingencies of protest may encourage or discourage continued involvement. One critical aspect of these contingencies, I argue, is how the action ends. Two protest actions are analyzed as a participant with a focus on how the protest ended and if the operant "attending a protest" was reinforced or punished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The urban studies and planning literatures largely conceive of community organizations as either clients of neoliberal regimes or the advocates of marginalized communities. Whereas the first emphasizes structural constraints, the latter focuses on the conditions that permit organizations to exercise agency in planning arenas. This theoretical paper suggests that both frameworks reveal important mechanisms but belie the contradictory pressures facing community organizations. We turn to organizational and social movement literatures to argue that community organizations face two competing forces stemming from resource needs. First, they need money to maintain a staff and finance basic operations. As these are nonprofit organizations, money typically comes from external private and public grants. Second, for communities to support organizations and delegate them representative functions, the organizations need to be considered legitimate by the community. Though community organizations need both money and legitimacy, these resources conflict with one another. Too much dependency on external funders can undercut an organization's legitimacy to represent community interests in an autonomous and unconflicted way. Too much autonomy from external funders can enhance the legitimacy of organizations, but it can also result in financial destitution. Thus, rather than conceive of community organizations as structural puppets or the voice of the people, we suggest that most are positioned in a contradictory field that pulls them in conflicting directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe has experienced the adverse effects of climate change due to the human footprint on a scale never seen before. The region's future appears challenging as it persistently adheres to conventional practices. To address this, social movements in Europe must advocate for policymakers to earnestly undertake the widely advocated energy transition within the existing socioeconomic model. A crucial aspect for governments is to comprehend the status along the trajectory of this transition. In this study, we investigate the intricate relationship between emissions, economy, and energy spanning the years 1990 to 2019 across 32 European countries. Our analysis differentiates among major polluting sectors, utilizing a dynamic model that accounts for potential structural breaks. Our findings confirm the presence of ruptures in the stability of the parameters, revealing three distinct periods marked by historical shocks. While the majority of European countries exhibit a decoupling between emissions and economic growth, a contrasting trend is observed between emissions and energy consumption. Notably, the energy supply and residential sectors emerge as the most problematic due to their high carbon intensity. However, the decoupling process remains distant in terms of energy, underscoring the imperative shift toward renewable energy sources over conventional fossil-based fuels. This study emphasizes the urgency of adopting sustainable practices to mitigate climate change and encourages a revaluation of current energy paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Andhra Pradesh Zero Budget Natural Farming project was implemented by India's State of Andhra Pradesh in 2016 and renamed AP Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) in 2020. APCNF is recognised as a sucessful example of peasant-led agroecology by social movements, multilateral UN bodies, governments, and researchers. We offer more critical perspectives here, and argue that this agroecology model deepens inequality and dispossession. Despite claims to the contrary, APCNF is locked in an unchanged productivist paradigm controlled by capital in collaboration with the state. By co-opting agroecology, APCNF closes down options for a just transformation of the dominant agri-food regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

College students and campuses have played key roles in social movements because colleges' cultural and structural features tend to facilitate movements. But such attributes vary across campuses. This quantitative study models how two campus features that correspond to core elements of social movement theory—students' collective identity strength and social network density—appear to impact United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) groups' presence and success on 1,265 US 4‐year public and private nonprofit campuses during 2000–2006, operationalizing success as schools' joining the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) monitoring organization. Results generally indicate that collective identity strength and network density promote USAS presence and that network density facilitates WRC membership. USAS presence is pivotal, though not required, for WRC membership. Our logistic regression models also confirm that campus opportunity structures and off‐campus movement actors' roles help account for these USAS outcomes; notably, antiunion location ("Right‐to‐Work" states) undermines and Roman Catholic school affiliation encourages USAS presence and success. We identify theoretically why certain factors may promote only some forms of student activism (e.g., conscience constituent but not beneficiary‐based groups). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnography developed with social movements derived from the eviction process of an old popular district in the city of São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil, we analyze how an idea of neighborship is applied to the processes of struggle and their outcomes. In 2004, a land of over 1,000,000 m2, owned by a bankrupt industry, was occupied by an entire district of over 5,000 people. This "illegal" occupation had been going on for almost 8 years when a court decision ordered the land to be vacated. The case of the Pinheirinho dos Palmares neighborhood, as it was known, became an emblematic example of Brazilian housing policies, with its violent eviction drawing the entire country's attention. This article deals with the struggles that the evicted residents started and that resulted, at the end of almost 5 years, in the construction of a new district by the state, based on a new housing program. We are going to analyze how concerns about organizing the new neighborship from the old neighborhood relations were fundamental in the geographical and architectural production of the new district. The article seeks to intertwine the notions of resistance and neighborship, responsible for the new configuration of the district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine youth activism in Poland, focusing on the University of Gdańsk occupation, the Youth Climate Strike, and Stop Bzdurom’s direct actions. Using critical pedagogy of place, they analyse how youth activists drive social change and reclaim public spaces. The study highlights reinhabitation and decolonisation of public spaces as arenas for the common good and marginalised communities’ rights. It also explores the influence of radicalism and activism on society, particularly amid an ageing population and political polarisation. Detailed case analyses contribute to understanding youth roles in social movements and change, emphasising youth activism’s significance in shaping society’s future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an original protest event dataset covering 30 European countries and the period 2000–2021, this paper studies the nature and drivers of protest mobilisation across three major crises that have hit European Member States (the Eurozone, refugee, and Covid crises). Contributing a crisis-comparative perspective to social movement research, we explore crisis mobilisation in three steps. First, looking at general protest trends throughout the past decade, we find that the overall level of protest declined significantly, and especially so after the Eurozone crisis. Second, we characterise crisis-specific protest in terms of the action forms and the actors involved. We find a high involvement of institutional actors in the Eurozone crisis, a high share of radical events in the refugee crisis, and a generally non-confrontational protest organised by civil society actors in the Covid crisis. Finally, we explain crisis-specific protest levels by examining the mobilising effect of grievances. More specifically, we study the impact of problem pressure (how hard countries were affected using economic, migration, and public health indicators) and political pressure from public opinion (the salience of crisis-specific issues) and show that both were important drivers in the three crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this paper we explore how a Citizens’ Assembly project in Auroville – the largest intentional community in the world – sought to prefigure new practices in collective decision-making. A Citizens’ Assembly model is a democratic innovation that enacts a deliberative mode of political decision-making by everyday citizens. It has been used by diverse bodies, from social movements to nation-state governments around the world. Auroville’s 2021 Citizens’ Assembly pilot – concerning a water vision for Auroville – is a unique case study that enables us to make a distinctive contribution to the existing academic scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and prefigurative politics on two grounds. Firstly, Auroville is an intentional community shaped by specific spiritual and self-governance values – an uncommon setting for a Citizens’ Assembly that supports us to make specific empirical offerings not seen in the literature on Citizens’ Assemblies to date. Secondly, given that Auroville’s pilot Citizens’ Assembly sought to prefigure the community’s foundational ideals of “human unity” and “unending education” in its collective decision-making practice, we connect our analysis to the academic scholarship concerning prefigurative politics. In doing so, we uniquely draw together the scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and the literature concerning prefigurative politics to explore whether such democratic innovations have a transformative effect on the political contexts they are embedded in, which we freshly consider with a focus on local scale, and the role that institutionalisation might have in terms of ensuring the reproduction, and thereby lasting impact of such experiments, or conversely their nullification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the emergence and development of a social movement community among LGBTQ population. Drawing on the case of the LGBTQ movement in South Korea between 1993 and 2019 from a longitudinal perspective, we identify the relational dynamics of how different movement groups avoid internal frictions and successfully develop a movement community. Our findings suggest that, as a response to repeated repressive external events, LGBTQ groups have formed and maintained collaborative networks based on a common identity as “sexual minorities.” By examining the networks of movement coalitions, we also identify key movement groups that played a critical role in connecting other groups with disparate sexual and gender identities within the community. These bridging actors were either the pioneering gay and lesbian groups that have collaborated since the 1990s or the new groups founded around inclusive collective identities such as “sexual minorities” or “queers.” Implications for the studies on social movements and homosexuality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal bureaucrats in the United States—mostly on the social side of the state (e.g. public health, welfare, educators, housing, and sometimes urban planners) but not exclusively so (e.g. district attorney offices)—have shown growing willingness to engage in political battles within the bureaucracy, connect with social movements, and construct oppositional identities centred on social and racial justice. Critical urban theories of the state highlight important constraints that shape state strategies, functions, and policies but tell us little about the contradictions propelling some bureaucrats into political contests over power and legitimacy. Consequently, we turn to theorists who conceive of the bureaucratic state as a contradictory and relatively autonomous field where conflicts between dominated and dominant bureaucrats overlap and converge with conflicts between dominated and dominant class forces (Bourdieu, Gramsci, Hall, and Poulantzas). Their observations are used to formulate the three propositions that underpin our theoretical framework. These propositions draw attention to the structural, relational, and conjunctural processes involved in forming individual bureaucrats into an insurgent political subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the common portrayal of White Power music as evolving from, or being an element of, Oi! punk. The paper traces the histories of White Power music and Oi!, and analyses a sample of 268 Oi! songs for racist or fascist lyrics. It shows that, while some Oi! artists and audience members were involved in far-right activism, the subculture was not itself fascist or overtly racist. Many of those involved in Oi! took action against racism and far-right movements, and almost no songs included racist lyrics. The paper proposes two arguments. First, drawing from Worley, media and scholarly portrayals of Oi! as racist or fascist may represent the demonization of the working-class. Second, that White Power co-opted elements of Oi! does not mean that White Power music emerged from Oi!. Rather it likely emerged from first-wave punk at roughly the same time as Oi!. The central argument being that the White Power music scene, and the far-right more generally, is parasitical. It feeds upon the resources of larger scenes and subcultures, often harming them in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of pluriversal politics, which encompasses the vast array of alternatives to ecologically destructive and colonial capitalism, is crucial for envisioning emancipatory futures. However, the diversity of the initiatives composing the pluriverse poses obstacles to the unity necessary to dismantle interconnected systems of oppression, thus creating an intrinsic dilemma between diversity and unity. This paper explores the navigation of this challenge within emancipatory and pluriversal projects, drawing on material from ethnographic research on the Neapolitan Commons movement. The case study illuminates how social movement actors achieve simultaneous unity and diversity through the grassroots-developed concept of ‘hegemony of non-hegemony.’ In the Neapolitan context, this framework allows diversity to thrive while maintaining essential unity, crucial for confronting economic and political powers. The findings underscore how grassroots, autonomous, and pluriversal degrowth practices can challenge capitalist growth dynamics through unity in diversity, hence suggesting the unnecessary nature of state-led, top-down, or uniformizing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In this research, we examine how intragroup fragmentation, which is the division of a group into smaller subgroups, interacts with different forms of action against gender inequality. We focused on two types of action: actions that promote social change and actions that encourage retribution. Methods: We investigated these processes within the #MeToo social movement using data collected in Australia (N = 363) and Romania (N = 135). In both samples, we measured antecedents of 'group consciousness' (previous experience with discrimination, empathic concern, and perspective taking) and its indicators (social identification, perceived group efficacy beliefs, and group emotions such as anger and contempt). As indicators of intragroup fragmentation, we measured endorsement of different categories of group behaviors such as pro-social change action versus pro-retribution action. To assess the predictive power of motivations for joining the movement (antecedents of group consciousness) and of group consciousness for either pro-social or retributive actions, we tested several structural equation models (SEMs). Results: Our results indicate that the motivations for joining such social movements were more complex than anticipated, with perspective-taking emerging as a significant differentiator. Our analyses further show that different dimensions of group consciousness could predict support for either pro-social or retributive actions. Discussion: These findings highlight the complexity of the intragroup processes in newly emerging, modern social movements such as #MeToo. Our findings have implications for the study of membership dynamics in social movements and suggest that strategies to mobilise support should be tailored to these complexities. Overall, this research contributes to the current understanding of intragroup dynamics in contemporary social movements, thereby providing insights that could inform both grassroots mobilisation strategies and policy interventions aiming to increase gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse on environmental challenges has evolved significantly in recent years, with climate change emerging as a central global concern. This transformation has been heavily influenced by the last wave of youth-led social movements, notably the Fridays for Future movement, who have mobilized young people at a global scale contributing at a shift in public discourse on the topic of climate action. However, despite the impact of the newly emerged youth-led movements it is still rather unclear if and where has youth gained recognition as a group with special interests within environmental policy and governance. In this study we report on a research were we investigated the positioning of youth in contemporary environmental governance, and propose a theoretical perspective to understand how the subject category of "youth" is constructed in public discourse and its implications for political recognition. We study the progressive emergence of Greta Thunberg as a voice for a generation of youth climate activists and undertake a document analysis of selected material generated in relation to selected international political events. By addressing questions of recognition, discourse structure, and legitimacy, this research aims to shed light on the nuanced dynamics shaping the role of youth in environmental policy and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watching movies is among the most popular entertainment and cultural activities. How do viewers react when a movie sequel increases racial minority actors in the main cast ("minority increase")? On the one hand, such sequels may receive better evaluations if viewers appreciate racially inclusive casting for its novel elements (the value-in-diversity perspective) and moral appeal (the fairness perspective on diversity). On the other hand, discrimination research suggests that if viewers harbor biases against racial minorities, sequels with minority increase may receive worse evaluations. To examine these competing possibilities, we analyze a unique panel dataset of movie series released from 1998 to 2021 and conduct text analysis of 312,457 reviews of these movies. Consistent with discrimination research, we find that movies with minority increase receive lower ratings and more toxic reviews. Importantly, these effects weaken after the advent of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, especially when the movement's intensity is high. These results are reliable across various robustness checks (e.g., propensity score matching, random implementation test). We conceptually replicate the bias mitigation effect of BLM in a preregistered experiment: Heightening the salience of BLM increases White individuals' acceptance of racial minority increase in a movie sequel. This research demonstrates the power of social movements in fostering diversity, equality, and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Repression has long been regarded as the main response of the state when encountering contentious actions. Although recent studies point out that repression may vary by regime types and state-level concerns regarding international reputation, few analyses to date have analyzed how movement dynamics and movement targets jointly shape state responses. In this article, I analyze over 7,500 episodes of labor protests in mainland China to advance scholarship on state responses to social movements. I develop a typology of state responses, from active coercion to accommodation and even tolerance. I then explore differences in state responses based on protest tactics and whether they are against private or state-affiliated targets. My results show that state responses differ based on the tactics that movements employ. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by whether activists target state-affiliated or private entities. This research offers important insights into the dynamic relations between state and social movement, the diverse ways highly bureaucratic governments use to manage social unrest, and the conflict between maintaining legitimacy and social control in both authoritarian and democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies examine how LGBTQ life differs between large, cosmopolitan cities like San Francisco and other, less prominent cities. Nevertheless, most of this research is done through case studies of one or a handful of LGBTQ communities, making it unclear how unique the large hubs of LGBTQ life truly are. This study leverages nationally complete data from the U.S. Gayellow Pages, a historical listing of local LGBTQ organizations, to evaluate how the organizational response of LGBTQ communities to the AIDS crisis—arguably the most prolific era of organizational creation in LGBTQ history—differed between large hubs and other cities. Findings make clear the risks of generalizing about LGBTQ life from large hubs alone. Although AIDS stimulated the creation of health-related and social movement organizations in large hubs, AIDS was more strongly associated with organizational creation outside of rather than within large hubs. The types of organizations created due to AIDS tended to be more varied outside of rather than within large hubs as well. These differences highlight the value of decentering the large hubs of LGBTQ life as units of analysis in the study of sexuality and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community supported agriculture, ecovillages, and renewable energy cooperatives are all instances of sustainable materialism initiatives. Currently, a wealth of research assesses their prefigurative dimensions and documents their market strategies; yet there is little explanation of why such initiatives rise and fall over time. This article aims to fill this gap. To do so, I investigate the lifespans of renewable energy cooperative projects in Denmark and France. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis, I argue that the rise and fall of these projects can be explained by the evolution of one type of economic power: the power of orientation, or the ability of collective organizations to simultaneously act in and act on a policy regime to create market opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petitioning provided a flexible repertoire for women’s political activity in the decades after 1945. Petitioning was a popular, widespread practice: aside from voting, signing a petition was one of the few political activities that engaged a majority of women. Building on a long tradition of British women as active petitioners, petitioning was used by a variety of different groups—local action groups, voluntary associations, political parties, pressure groups, and radical social movements, including those associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement. Connecting formal and informal politics, petitioning was a relatively cheap, accessible form of political activity that enabled activism. In particular, the practices associated with name-signing created informal, temporary political spaces for women. Petitioning also provided a mechanism for representation and making representative claims to authority on behalf of women. The media-friendly spectacle of presenting petitions to authority was useful for attracting publicity as a range of activists, including conservative moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse realised. The flexibility of petitioning explain its popularity as a form of political participation for women, particularly in facilitating local, informal activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Gender-based harassment is a pressing social challenge urgently demanding eradication. While social movements emphasize supporting victims, societal responses sometimes lean toward exculpating perpetrators. This study examines two factors influencing this exoneration: closeness to perpetrators and empathy focus. Methods: A total of 345 participants took part in an experimental design to assess how closeness to perpetrators (close vs. distant) and empathy focus (on the perpetrator vs. victim vs. control) impact the moral justification of harassment and the dehumanization of both parties. Results and discussion: Results indicate that closeness and empathizing with perpetrators lead to greater leniency--more moral justification and less dehumanization of the perpetrator. Heightened moral justification for close perpetrators is mediated by increased empathy toward them and decreased empathy for victims, and reduced dehumanization of close perpetrators corresponds to heightened empathy toward them. This research highlights how closeness and empathy, two initially positive factors, can foster tolerance toward gender harassment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic signalling is crucial in affecting movements and in social interactions. In species with dynamic social structures, such as multi-level societies, acoustic signals can provide a key mechanism allowing individuals to identify and find or avoid each other and to exchange information. Yet, if the spacing between individuals regularly exceeds the maximum signalling range, the relation between movements and signals becomes more complex. As the best-studied songbird in captivity, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia castanotis) is a species with individually distinct songs that are audible over just a few metres and a widely ranging dynamic multi-level social organization in the wild, raising questions on the actual role of its song in social cohesion and coordination. Here, we provide an overview of birdsong in social organizations (networks) and use the ecology of the zebra finch and male song to discuss how singing can facilitate social cohesion and coordination in species where the signal range is very short. We raise the question of the extent to which zebra finches are a representative species to understand the function of song in communication, and we broaden current views on the function of birdsong and its individual signature. This article is part of the theme issue 'The power of sound: unravelling how acoustic communication shapes group dynamics'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diaspora movements are campaigns launched by migrant minorities who maintain allegiance to their homelands. This article investigates the recent mobilization of the Hongkonger, Thai, Burmese, and Ukrainian diasporas in Taiwan to understand the factors behind their tactical choices. While the existing literature pays more attention to the protester-government interaction to understand how movement leaders decide on their movement strategy, we contend that certain pre-existing characteristics of the diaspora communities matter more. The use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) leads us to conclude: (1) ethnic discrimination, migrants’ class position, and the host government’s support do not affect the tactical choices; (2) a sufficiently large community with available mobilizing networks makes it possible to recruit and collect resources entirely from ethnic compatriots (reach-in); (3) linkages to local civil society enable it to speak to a broader audience and activate local responses (reach-out). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representation is an important role of the nonprofit sector as these organizations can give voice to the priorities of their constituents. This is particularly important for disadvantaged communities that may lack access to traditional democratic processes. What advocacy tactics are most utilized by nonprofit organizations serving disadvantaged populations? Given variation in nonprofit advocacy tactics, which tactics are perceived as most effective? To answer these questions, we look to the framework of tactical repertoires from sociological studies of social movements. Analysis of a survey of New England nonprofits (N = 656, 55 % response rate) indicates that nonprofits serving disadvantaged populations use similar tactics to organizations advocating for other constituencies but employ them at higher rates. These tactics cluster into three tactical repertoires, each a different combination of advocacy tactics. Perceptions of advocacy effectiveness are associated with the size and nature of tactical repertoires, client participation in advocacy, government funding, and perceptions of the policy environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 14, 2013, the Egyptian security forces raided the Rabaa and al-Nahda sit-ins, marking the largest mass killing in modern Egyptian history. The massacre, aimed at targeting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – henceforth MB – did not end its existence; rather, it recast it as a movement in exile striving for organisational survival. Drawing on interview materials, MB media outlets, and a process tracing of key international and regional events unfolding between 2013 and 2023, this article explores the interactive relationship between exile politics and the MB’s survival action frames from a framing perspective. By mapping four successive phases highlighting its organisational trajectories to pursue survival, the article contends that the MB’s survival action frames result from the interactive relationship between failed mobilisation tactics and changes in the MB’s hosting environment which together affected and sustained intra-movement divisions. Following shifts in exile politics and inefficient mobilisation tactics to face the post-2013 Coup, the MB’s survival action frames included the organisational recentralisation of a demobilised and inactive movement and the re-setting of the group’s priorities amid unresolved leadership strife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposing social movements are groups that have conflicting objectives on a shared social justice issue. To maximize the probability of their movement's success, groups can strategically portray their group in a favourable manner while discrediting their opposition. One such approach involves the construction of victimization discourses. In this research, we combined topic modelling and critical discursive psychology to explore how opposing groups within the feminist movement used victimization as a lens to understand their movements in relation to transgender women. We compiled a dataset of over 40,000 tweets from 14 UK‐based feminist accounts that included transgender women as women (the pro‐inclusion group) and 13 accounts, that excluded transgender women (the anti‐inclusion group). Our results revealed differences in how victimization was employed by the opposing movements: pro‐inclusion groups drew on repertoires that created a sense of shared victimhood between cisgender women and transgender women, while anti‐inclusion groups invoked a competitive victimhood repertoire. Both groups also challenged and delegitimised their oppositions' constructions of feminism and victimhood. These findings add to our understanding of the communication strategies used by opposing movements to achieve their mobilization goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In various European countries, the post-fascist nationalist and populist parties identified by Ignazi in the early 1990s 'silent counter-revolution' now hold power, at least as part of coalitions. The values they represent can no longer be described as marginal to the national conversations on identity, immigration and security, issues that revolve around racialized understandings of the social world. In recent years we have observed similar phenomena in the Americas and Asia (with the Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi regimes). Moreover, state actors and social movements have developed initiatives aimed at undermining and reversing any small--sometimes symbolic--progress made toward equality. Various attacks on academic concepts relating to racism in the UK, France and the USA, for example, are not isolated stand-alones but elements of a global pushback against such ideas, orchestrated and encouraged by the nationalist political right, working through media, government and funded civil society organisations. These discourses redraw national identity to portray antiracist work as unpatriotic and indeed threatening to the nation. One of the strands in France's long and fractious conversation about its colonial history and postcolonial present has constructed an opposition between republican values and Muslims. The American right's long war on racial equality has generated a campaign to eradicate 'critical race theory' from education. These two examples illustrate and identify common elements and specifics in a global trend whereby the concepts used by activists and social scientists to understand and frame struggles for racial equality are deliberately and strategically invalidated and vilified in the public domain, and ideologically produced as un-patriotic. I call this discourse 'anti-anti racism'. These efforts are part of wider campaigns, or 'counter acts', aimed at reversing progressive political gains from the last half century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies into nonviolent resistance have led to a broad but scattered understanding of why some of these movements erupt and succeed, while others do not. This article offers a multilevel framework of analysis to explain trajectories of nonviolent resistance in repressive regimes and illustrates this framework by analysing the potential of Russian domestic nonviolent resistance to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The proposed framework incorporates seven overarching factors identified in previous studies, namely the political and economic system, the international relations, the level of modernization, the distribution of power within society, and the grievances, resources and organizational capacity of the resistance group. Based on this framework, it is tentatively concluded that Russia's political and economic system, the limited power dispersion and the lack of organization among the opposition help to explain why no successful resistance has emerged. Additional case studies are required to further assess the framework's utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a sociology of Twitter (now known as X) and charts the development of the study of the platform and its data in sociological venues through an analysis of 1,644 articles published since 2009. This review helps readers understand developments in the field and provides a road map for advancing future Twitter-related sociological research. The works cited in this review advance sociological research on a variety of subfields, including but not limited to race, social movements, segregation, politics, violence, and stratification. After a brief introduction of definitions as well as methodological approaches used to study the platform (computational, qualitative, and mixed), I explore how Twitter has been used in sociological research. Furthermore, using social movements and activism as a case study, I highlight what the platform's usage and communication reveal about the social world. I conclude with a road map for advancing Twitter-related sociological research in the current atmosphere in which Twitter has been renamed X. Ultimately, a sociology of Twitter does not need to be tethered to the platform per se, as it also provides a framework for understanding new platforms if they become home for what people previously posted to Twitter/X. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three recent cases—Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis— the U.S. Supreme Court held in favor of a conservative Christian claimant who sought a religious exemption, reasoning that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise or Free Speech clause exempted the claimant from complying with a validly enacted antidiscrimination provision barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Many legal scholars and commentators have decried these decisions as radically altering First Amendment law at the expense of LGBTQ civil rights. In contrast, many national LGBTQ rights organizations have engaged in a different kind of narrative about these cases, one that tends to minimize the scope and breadth of the risk and retrenchment created by these decisions. I call this the Narrowness Narrative because it characterizes these three decisions as narrow in ways that obscure the bigger and more troubling picture, namely the Court’s burgeoning sympathy for the interests of the white Christian nationalism movement and the undeniable trend of the Court’s elevation of these interests and the concomitant subordination of marginalized communities, including the LGBTQ community. In his Childress Lecture and article, Professor Ball counsels that, in order to keep progressivism’s distributive and egalitarian goals centered within the progressive legal movement, “it is important for progressive activists, commentators, and academics to consider how specific constitutional claims made in court impact the framing of policy questions outside of the judicial context.” This essay adapts and extends that call to a different stage of the life cycle of LGBTQ rights litigation and, in some instances to different actors in that movement, by focusing on the post-mortem messaging of national LGBTQ rights organizations upon the Court’s issuing of a ruling that diminishes LGBTQ equality. I advocate that these national organizations ought to be attentive to progressivism’s distributive and egalitarian goals when issuing public statements about anti-LGBTQ U.S. Supreme Court decisions and contend that the Narrowness Narrative is counterproductive to progressivism’s goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to situate the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) as an alternative to the capitalist economic system that has more and more weight and presence in the Basque socio-economic panoramaour public action space, in the field of socio-educational action as well. Specifically, our main objective is to analyse the reality of SSE socio-educational entities in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (ACBC). In terms of methodology, we would like to highlight the qualitative study through the review and analysis of 54 SSE projects in the ACBC during the period from November 2022 to March 2023, linked to social and labor insertion. The following elements have been taken as study dimensions: participating groups, areas of work, territory, geographical scope, volume of employment, permanence, source of financing, level of transparency, intercooperation and networks and movements for social transformation. Some of the results found indicate that, among other issues: economic projects with social purposes continue to grow and are resilient, more and more work sectors are covered, and bringing together these elements (economic and even environmental and social) is an opportunity for coherence and for a just social transformation as a means to confront capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do non-state armed groups form in intra-state armed conflicts? Researchers have started to disaggregate armed groups, but we still know little about how armed groups emerge in different ways. Drawing on the literature on social movements, civil wars, and civil–military relations, we generate a typology of 'movement', 'insurgent', and 'state splinter' origins of armed groups. We argue that fundamentally different dynamics of conflict shape armed group origins in the context of broad-based mobilisation, peripheral challenges to the state, and intra-regime fragmentation. Armed groups that emerge in these contexts in general differ in their initial membership and leadership, the basic organisational dimensions that we focus on. We demonstrate the utility of our typology by mapping different origins of armed groups onto existing cross-national data and charting type narratives in illustrative cases. This discussion advances recent efforts to understand the importance of armed group emergence for outcomes of interest to conflict scholars by moving beyond either separate types of origins or highly disaggregated organisational analyses to broader conflict dynamics through which armed groups form, with implications for how these groups act. Future research should consider different origins which we identify in comparison through an in-depth analysis of armed groups' complex histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with State inefficiency in housing provision, the occupation of the Cambridge Hotel, located on the outskirts of São Paulo’s city center, was used as a case study to identify possibilities in the struggle for social housing. The building, initially a hotel built in the 1950s, closed in 2002, was expropriated in 2011, and occupied by the Downtown Homeless Movement (Movimento Sem Teto do Centro) in 2012. The movement, after social tensions and participation in participatory councils, obtained the donation of the property and its license in a federal requalification program. Through qualitative analysis of the housing deficit in Brazil, characterized by the excessive burden of rents and the precariousness of real estate, in contrast to housing policies focused on the production of units through development programs in peripheral locations, it is understood that the analysis of the determining factors for the case study’s feasibility can contribute to the discussion of government policies and actions. The methodology, based on the procedural field, observational methods, and literature review in the logical field, was structured in dialectical and inductive methods for the research, systematization, and critical analysis of bibliographic and documentary references and, in empirical processes, in the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews and onsite visits. It was concluded that the power of dialogue and formation of the movement’s networks and its strategy, based on surrounding itself with actors that solidify its struggle, contributed to the viability of the Cambridge Hotel as a residential property. Based on the data analyzed, it is also argued that the participation of municipalities is undeniable in enabling the provision of housing in central areas. However, considering the hegemonic bias identified, the political action of social movements and the participation of academia in its instrumentalization are essential to strengthen the Capital-State relationship and enable the collation of territorial policies that the right to the city contemplates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War–Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as "internal enemy." People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the war, hydroelectric projects have been identified with security, given their promises of light and progress. I explore how "scripts" like Race, The State, Citizenship, and The Plantation are inscribed into such objects and how obdurate such prescriptions are. Yet Akrich says that users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens the objects remain a chimera (p. 208). Through several moments over the last seventy years in Guatemala, I show how various forms of "security"—bodily, communal, productive, national, and financial—are at stake and how hydroelectrics are always under contestation, always chimera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of insurgency in scaling up the co‐production of housing. Co‐production has gained in popularity in the past 15 years as both a set of practices and an intellectual framing for analyzing urbanization in the global South. Discussions of co‐production have largely emphasized the cooperative nature of the approach, asserting that a mostly non‐confrontational politics has proven effective at reshaping urban governance in ways that better meet the needs of the urban poor. However, recent analyses have identified conflict versus confrontation as a key tension in co‐production, especially as co‐productive programs seek to go to scale. I contribute to these discussions by analyzing a well‐known case of large‐scale co‐production, Thailand's Baan Mankong program, to understand the roles of insurgent versus cooperative community networks in the program's trajectory. I conclude that a more insurgent network opens up new land, resources and avenues for political participation. A more cooperative network then renders many of these interventions broadly politically acceptable to those in power. The two networks thus exist in a dialectic that has enabled the program's scaling up. I argue that research into co‐production should pay more attention to the importance of confrontational tactics by community networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research was to find out the experiences of informants with regard to their sexuality and to look at the role of PLUSH in the discourse of 'nonnormative' sexuality in Indonesia, more specifically Yogyakarta. This research method is a qualitative research with a'mini' approach to discourse analysis by Foucault, research informants, data collection techniques (interviews, literature studies, documentation, and other media sources), data presentation, and triangulation. The data used came from primary data, namely interviews with the five informants (Bhista (30), Shamil (37), Nakula (35), Abimanyu (23) and Rangga (26), as well as secondary data from reliable sources (documentation from the media, literature, and others). The results of this study are as follows: (1) a world dominated by heteronomous concepts, where general discourse tends to corner non-binary sexuality, as experienced by members of the PLUSH, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. (2) The research contributes to the fields of community empowerment, social movements, LGBTQ studies, and social policy by providing a platform for marginalized voices and documenting new social movements. (3) The research is based on the theory of panopticon prison theory, which is used to describe the experience of the informants in exploring and fighting for their sexual identity in the context of a dominating discourse. It is hoped that further research can involve informants from various sexual orientations such as asexual and bisexual, to provide a more comprehensive picture of non-heteronormal sexuality discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the novel understanding of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a sect, going against the grain of the existing literature, which posits it as a political group, a social movement, or a religious movement (or some combination of all of the above). The sectarianisation occurs within the group via ideological build-up, organisational tactics, and internal socialisation of behaviour. The group is also a sect by constituting its unique identity in opposition to external actors. To make the argument, the analysis draws on the statements of key figures within the movement's history, such as its founder Hasan al-Banna, as well as a range of interviews with current and ex-members. My argument has two main consequences for our understanding of sectarianism in general and the Brotherhood in particular. First, sectarianism is a process of sectarianisation that operates beyond the state and at lower levels, such as groups and individuals. Second, the Brotherhood is not a mere victim of the sectarianising practices of the state. Its sectarianisation is partly of its own making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy requires collective action—but not all forms of collective action are the same. Scholars need a more coherent intellectual infrastructure to differentiate distinct forms of collective action and to identify the kinds of collective action that enable democracy. We distinguish between two types of collective action: organizing, which seeks to transform individuals and groups into effective agents who can shape public outcomes, and mobilizing, which seeks to aggregate and articulate preferences in the public sphere with no explicit focus on individual or organizational change. We review work identifying the dimensions of possible transformation at the micro, meso, and macro levels, and existing evidence for it. We urge scholars to study organizing separate from (and in comparison to) mobilizing and suggest possible research strategies and questions. In doing so, we aim to provide a foundation for future research on organizing and its relationship to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at discussing the involvement of "humanitarian" actors, stemming from civil society, in treatment of the issue of refugees' reception. It suggests the concept of "de-bordering solidarity," to express the political meaning of such mobilizations. With this term, it refers to various forms of support provided by activists and volunteers, through which these actors contest policies of asylum and borders in practice, even when they do not advance overt political claims. Furthermore, the article factors four types of actors involved in the reception of asylum seekers, namely NGOs, other Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), social movements and common citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Brazil, many women are victims of different forms of domestic violence, which can be physical, psychological, moral, sexual and patrimonial. Women victims of domestic violence tend to look for close people to ask for help to get out of the situation, therefore, an informal support network can be an important tool for women to feel protected and ask for help from public organizations. Given that solidarity economic enterprises (SEE) formed only by women are a space for women to strengthen each other, where they socialize and can create bonds, they can also serve as an informal support network for the women who form them, in addition to fostering their financial autonomy. The objective of this article is to identify whether SEE can be part of a support network for women, from the perspective of the women who form them. To this end, three SEE of women were investigated in the brazilian municipality of Araraquara, which has an important history of social movements and public policies aimed at the social and solidarity economy. From the semi-structured interviews carried out with 11 women from three of these SEE, it was possible to obtain results that explain what happens in the empirical field in relation to the theory, such as that women feel comfortable and trust each other, but at the same time At the same time, they do not identify patrimonial violence as violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century is witness to a revival of interest in the bildungsroman as writers, especially from postcolonies in the Global South, turn to it to reflect on concerns of history, culture, and social life in a postcolonial setting. Scholars, however, disagree regarding the nature of these reworkings. Some see them as a continuation of the original European models established by Goethe, Dickens, and other European writers. Others find such associations Eurocentric and call for more local standards of evaluation. This article examines this debate by looking closely at a version of the postcolonial bildungsroman proposed by the Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy in his 1965 novel Samskara. The novel follows an orthodox Brahmin priest from Karnataka who, disillusioned by the corruption and moral decay in his community, embarks on a pilgrimage to rediscover his identity in the rapidly modernizing world of twentieth‐century India. Ananthamurthy's bildungsroman, while retaining some structural similarities, departs from European models in fundamental ways. The motif of the hero's journey, for instance, is flipped. The novel tracks the hero's growing discontentment with his community leading to a sense of communal alienation, thus inverting the European journey‐trajectory that typically follows the hero's movement toward social integration. It also deviates from the generic Western rags‐to‐riches storyline that complements that hero's road to social integration. Instead, it adopts the narrative structure of the Niti‐shastra, a set of precolonial Hindu texts that teach about the wise conduct of life. Such readings not only facilitate fresh ways of understanding the relationship between the Western and the postcolonial models, but they also allow new insights into understanding how South Asian authors utilize the bildungsroman to rediscover precolonial and classical works through modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-first century, African countries have hosted more mass movements than any other region in the world. In the last decade, one in every three nonviolent revolutionary campaigns has taken place in Africa. The region also has the highest short-term success rate for people power. But is this success predicated on the mobilizational force of "protest democracy" to hold elites accountable? Or are African social movements' remarkable successes an environmental artefact, the result of ordinary protests in contexts of extraordinary instability? The evidence suggests that African social movements are uniquely effective and that political and military elites are increasingly trying to harness their power. Ordinary people—marshalled in massive demonstrations and persistent civil society organizing—have played a necessary, often decisive role in agitating for democracy. However, eliciting successful breakthroughs requires the alignment of protester demands with the abandonment of the status quo by elite blocs. Recent cascades of irregular power transfers in African politics illustrate these distinctive dynamics, where diverse domestic political contexts share an important common ingredient: the combination of mass movements pushing for change and military power players who are willing to help them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides brief biographical information about various contributors to the Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds and have expertise in fields such as law, gender studies, literature, history, sociology, and art. Their research interests cover a wide range of topics including queer studies, reproductive justice, feminist theory, climate justice, and international law. The contributors have published books, articles, and essays on their respective areas of expertise and are actively engaged in academic and activist work. [Extracted from the article]

In October 2017, #MeToo quickly became a global phenomenon: shared over 12 million times on social media in the first twenty-four hours, reaching over eighty-five countries, there would be a "before" and an "after." As a polyphonic global cry against the prevalence of sexual violations, #MeToo is hard to apprehend or theorize within traditional frameworks. Neither a social movement as such nor an organized, coordinated campaign, #MeToo has no leaders, structures, defined aims, or specific goals behind it. Hence, what exactly is #MeToo, and how can we understand it in all its contradictions, nuances, and complexities? This article argues that #MeToo can best be understood as a contemporary form of parrhesia, a practice from Ancient Greece that, as Michel Foucault writes, consists of speaking dangerous truth to power and taking risks in doing so out of a sense of duty to improve a situation for oneself and others. Seeing it in this way allows us to complicate our understanding of both #MeToo and parrhesia as a collective, polyphonic, and decentralized praxis that opened up new ways of being and doing (justice) in relation to sexual violations. It is the collective character of #MeToo and parrhesia on social media that led some dominant truths about sexual violations to be challenged while others remained intact. Hence, for feminist scholars and activists, seeing #MeToo as parrhesia and parrhesia as #MeToo provides avenues to capitalize on what courageous truth speaking on social media can achieve without exaggerating its reach, thus doing justice to the millions of voices that spoke out against sexual violations without ignoring the limitations of #MeToo and parrhesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to eliminate 'child, early, and forced marriage', human rights violations with a wide range of harmful consequences, have intensified in the past twenty years as part of a growing social movement toward gender equality. The compound phrase 'child, early, and forced marriage' has become the preferred rhetoric in recent years and communicates a range of potentially harmful aspects of marriage, including the timing and consensuality of the event. However, we argue that two of the three component terms in 'child, early, and forced marriage' are not uniformly understood and, as a result, have not been adequately taken up in research, policy, or programming. In this review, we describe the history of this term and how different institutions define its individual components. We demonstrate that, in practice, 'child, early, and forced marriage' is often simplified to child marriage alone because this concept has a shared definition that is readily quantifiable. We recommend that clear definitions of early and forced marriage be developed and consistently applied alongside child marriage to further progress toward the overarching aim of improving gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]