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This paper explores the cultural dynamics underpinning platformization by unpacking the emergence of the sharing economy—a vital terrain of platformization—as a culturally significant category. Drawing on online archival data, our study reveals the important role of social movement organizations (SMOs) in establishing the sharing economy as a prominent cultural category and infusing it with powerful social meanings. We outline the discursive strategies used by SMOs to articulate this macro-market category, and to frame platform technology as a benevolent enabler of social change. Our study contributes to platformization research by turning attention to how cultural dynamics (i.e., the discursive strategies giving rise to the emergence of sharing economy) shape platformization. In addition, we contribute to market system dynamic research by expanding the focus of investigation from singular industries to the macro economy level, shedding light on new discursive dynamics (e.g., discursive strategies for articulating and technologizing the emergent economy), and by the extending previous work on the role of SMOs and social movements in market shaping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding disabled youth activism is key for improving young disabled people's participation in politics and social change. Young disabled people require opportunities to situate historical and biographical experiences within broader socio-economic contexts. This will lead to a politicised consciousness surrounding disability, emancipation and social justice. This article presents empirical data from the first study on young disabled people's contemporary position within the UK Disabled People's Movement. It critically assesses three areas pertinent to youth activism: activist membership, social movement organisation and future considerations for activism. This allows for an exploration of how young disabled activists navigate collective action, influence activist claims and demands and understand the issues for sustaining a disabled people's social movement. The article illustrates young disabled activists' desire to disrupt their current position within the UK Disabled People's Movement and bring into focus a future where young disabled people's contributions to activism and social movements are accessible, valued and influential. The article argues that a failure to support young disabled people's participation within social movements will have an adverse impact on their political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Gayatri Spivak's journey of subalternity, demonstrating the empirical and sociological salience of this category beyond its theoretical and epistemic features, by highlighting its potential for increasing our understanding of society and bringing about social change. This argument contests assumptions in the literature about an epistemic/empirical fracture in Spivak's work, recasting her theoretical frameworks as sociologically relevant. Moreover, it demonstrates that this sociological reading, although it goes 'against the grain' of Spivak's own reticence about understanding subalternity sociologically, is well-founded: the theoretical-epistemic aspects of Spivak's subalternity contribute to analyses about the situation of subaltern groups under colonialism and neoliberal globalisation and the means by which that subordination can be challenged. This illustrates that her conceptions of subalternity maintain sociological specificity vis-a-vis vague characterisations of subordination (e.g. oppression). Spivak's later reflections on subalternity then grapple with the sociological deadlocks of her early approach: the disentanglement between subalternity and class exploitation. Her work thus delineates an explanatory matrix, interweaving sociological, philosophical and literary tools to explore entangled aspects of the subaltern condition. This systematic reading of Spivak's approach expands and contests current scholarship, highlighting its sociologically compelling aspects and indicating the analytical and transformative potential of her matrix for future sociological debates on subalternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All over the world, traditional models of art activism through dance involved performances that reached a limited audience, while the advent of networked digital spaces has vastly expanded the scope of art activism to a global level. Offering a qualitative netnographic exploration of how Bharatanatyam has been employed for such art activism in the digital space, this article examines the implications for this prominent traditional South Indian dance form in terms of stylistic changes as well as viewer reactions. Through content analysis of the viewer responses to ten popular renditions uploaded on YouTube over five years (2016–2020), we trace how the art form is evolving and how activist goals are reciprocated by the audience. Our findings confirm that Bharatanatyam has great potential to evolve by adapting novel social themes. However, while such contemporary renditions may elicit viewer responses that critically appraise specific social issues and pave the way for social change, the resulting innovations continue to co-exist with old conflicts and tensions about 'traditional' art and its uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology, like most disciplines/institutions in racialized (and other oppressive) social systems, are steeped with policies and practices that are designed to maintain the status quo. Thus, they are partly responsible for the gatekeeping, careerism, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that plague our scholarly communities. In this piece, an extension of my 2018 Presidential Address to the Association for Humanist Sociology, I challenge academics to push back and find better ways, through critical humanist sociology, to serve the public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the uptake of social justice and climate change as focal issues among the largest U.S. environmental nonprofits. We use 2016 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings to identify 5,413 large environmental nonprofits of which 8% attend to issues of climate and 10% to issues of social justice. Larger organizations are more likely to attend to issues of climate change and social justice, as are groups founded more recently. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling of organizational mission statements and descriptions of major activities is used to assign groups to six distinct issue categories. Results highlight the divide between wildlife groups that are decidedly unlikely to attend to issues of either climate or justice, and the rest of the national environmental movement. Energy and natural resource groups, while strongly vested in climate issues, rarely attend to social justice. These findings have clear implications for climate and justice advocates seeking change in the environmental advocacy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do women who have faced housing instability interpret and set up strategies to access housing? This article reflects on biographical narrative interviews conducted with women who have experienced compulsory housing removal and with women who were living in squats organized by social movements in the city of Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil. These interviews were further analysed through the use of the biographical case reconstruction method. This method aims to comprehend the interviewees' past and present perspectives on experiences of struggle related to housing, and its connection to individual and family stories and broader socio-historical processes. The two cases discussed in this article show that to access formal housing through social policy, not rarely women confront socially and politically legitimate discourses and practices by adopting strategies beyond legal or formal means. The selected cases have demonstrated distinct perspectives on similar conditions, revealing that women who have faced housing instability can interpret and experience the consequent processes of temporariness and of changing geographical and social ties in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It remains to be seen whether the American Psychological Association's new apology and resolutions on racism will help redress longstanding inequities in the field. To be sure, critiques of psychological science vis-à-vis racism have been around for decades, despite being ignored by psychological science, even when spoken by Dr. King—in his profound meditation on science, psychology, and racism in a speech delivered to the APA—or by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon—who has had a foundational influence on the broader history of anti-racism scholarship but remains relatively disregarded in his own psy-fields. This article addresses the viewpoints of these and other people of color on psychological science, which have yet to be adequately incorporated into the perspectives of psychological science. We also address traditions of communities of color that have become absorbed or consumed by psychological science but often after their cultural and historical origins are erased, like Buddhism. We locate these racial and scientific dynamics, and associated patterns of neglect and erasure, within a longstanding aversion in and by psychological science—here understood as a collective actor unto itself—to perspectives of people of color. Consequently, the promise not only of diversity, but of desegregation, has yet to be fulfilled within psychology. We conclude by discussing the psychosocial power of social movements—including South Africa's apartheid-related Truth and Reconciliation process as personally experienced by our second author—to suggest elements of pathways forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Social trust has been compromised locally, nationally, and globally, and very recently more and more social scientists, ethicists, theologians, and civic leaders have highlighted its necessity for the function of social life. This article reviews the ways that social trust has been jeopardized and engages indicators that attempt to find where the trust is most at risk and what the better responses to it might be. It then turns to two collective gatherings, populism and synodality, to consider how we might better respond to these different forms of collective movements or gatherings so as to further the restoration of social trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the contributions of different worldviews to the debates on what a transformative sustainability education could be. It focuses on mainstream and alternative strands of thought present in the West, as well as Indigenous worldviews, taking the Zapatistas as an example. The Zapatista social movement of Mexico fights for the autonomy of Mayan communities and the preservation of their culture, social organization and relationship to nature, all of which centers on traditional Mayan cosmovision. To secure the survival of the culture and of the movement itself, these ecological values are included in the education system. The Zapatistas remind us that it is possible to rethink the world and the ideologies underlying the discourses on sustainability and suggest that taking a stand and organize politically should be at the center of an education for sustainability that aims at being transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how a formerly mocked policy idea became a widespread solution. Through content analysis of newspaper articles and legal documents, I develop a framework that extends timelines of social movement influence, expands the range of actors and locations of mobilization, and traces how activists frame policy ideas over time: the policy relay. This framework allows for an analysis of how opponents unintentionally advanced the reform process in 1993 by turning its originators into laughingstocks. Anti-rape advocates eventually reformulated the policy in 2014. This time, the origin was removed from the story, presenting a concise narrative that credited politicians and college administrators, rather than activists, for the reform. By tracing the ideas of a movement, rather than focusing on organizations or public protests, I uncover a complicated process of social change, where consequential actors work across different settings to ignite reforms and strategically remove controversial aspects from narratives of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no shortage of sociological research that explores the successes and failures of various sport-related social movements. However, a more capacious approach to understanding the significance of sport-related social movements, their imaginative actions and collective labor, and their impacts on social change, is one that shifts its focus away from binary categories of "success" and "failure". In this paper, we explore the formation of the short-lived Edmonton Community Benefits Coalition, which emerged in 2016 to oppose the lack of a legally binding Community Benefits Agreement associated with a new publicly financed National Hockey League arena in Edmonton's gentrifying city center, an area of spatially concentrated racialized poverty. Drawing from our ethnographic research, we examine how coalition members engaged in the collective labor of building solidarity, including the collaborative development of political strategies, while recognizing that the odds of successfully penetrating neoliberal capital and municipal governance were virtually impossible. Finally, given that the coalition ultimately "failed" to secure more significant institutional impacts, we offer an analysis of how this failure engendered several effects, including the cultivation of new relationships and political strategies in the ongoing struggle against gentrification and its related displacements in Edmonton, Alberta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with an emerging trend in political participation: the role played by football fans in engendering activism and protest. The role of fan activism in the debate on patterns of civic and political (dis)engagement – in the age of so-called anti-politics – has been ignored by the scholarly literature thus far. As a corrective, this article examines the development of football fan activism over the last thirty years, since the creation of the English Premier League in 1992. It adopts a case study approach centred on supporters' movements since 1992. It argues that the political activism of football fans has both quantitatively and qualitatively changed over this period. Employing the sociological theory of Manuel Castells it claims that collective identities developed in resistance to the commercialisation and commodification within football have developed into more distinct 'project identities' that seek bring about more profound social change through football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a study of digital composing in LGBTQ+ YouTube reaction video channels, I explore the role of emotion in shaping how writers in virtual communities collectively feel about injustice and write for social change. In the reaction videos, vloggers circulate funny, emotional reactions to anti-LGBTQ+ media undergirded by oppressive ideologies and norms. To guide the analysis, I draw on queer and Black feminist theories to conceptualize political feeling as cultural formations of emotions that shape how a community feels toward injustice and open or foreclose possibilities for movement toward social change. By constructing and analyzing composing events situated in a virtual ethnography, I find reaction videos construct and circulate the political feeling of radical joy, or willful and resistant happiness in the face of oppression. Radical joy, then, mediates the satirical critiques of interlocking structures of power and the development of belonging in struggles for liberation in the comment section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically major social movements seeking change, equality, and social justice have been driven by youth. In more recent decades, youth have been at the forefront of challenging the social, political, and ethical blind spots of their age. Continuing the historical role of youth in facilitating social change, their relevance is particularly important today. Much like past movements, in recent years youth have continued to advance the human condition in existing and new, critical directions. Nonetheless, direct youth engagement in social change is far from encouraged, and has declined, especially in situations that question the prevailing social, political, economic, and other ideologies. Youth are also easily dismissed as being idealistic, ill-informed, and unrealistic in their calls for social justice. In most settings, youth are treated as adults in waiting with little voice or ownership over efforts that impact society. In this special issue, and in direct contrast to the scenario outlined above, we seek to present a series of theoretical, empirical, and policy/practice related articles surrounding youth citizenship and action in the context of advancing social justice. Such engagement places youth at the forefront of both grassroots youth lead change and adult led youth engagement as a mechanism for systemic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of radical positive social change that advances the human condition. Historically major social movements seeking change, equality, and social justice have been driven by youth. The role of youth in facilitating social change is particularly relevant today more than half of the world's population is currently under 25, and a third under 15. While some see this "youth bulge" demographic as uninformed and vulnerable to extremism and exploitation, we reject this deficit model and see them as a population capable of, and already engaging in, transformational social thought and action. This paper argues that the broad field of youth engagement would benefit from examining youth contributions to upholding or challenging the social status quo through varying forms of civic engagement. We seek to guide research and practice in ways to distinguish types of youth engagement to better reflect its potential for positive change. Therefore, this article does three things: (1) distinguishes regimented and radical youth involvement from extremism; (2) distinguishes the contexts and environments where regimented and radical engagement operate; and (3) provides a conceptual framework to study and apply the key aspects of both, radical and regimented, youth engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in production and consumption patterns are urgently needed to address climate change. Although transnational agreements and national policy are necessary for a transition to a fully decarbonized global economy, fluctuating political priorities and lobbying by vested interests have slowed these efforts. Against this backdrop, bottom-up pressure from social movements and shifting social norms may offer a complementary path to a more sustainable economy. Furthermore, norm change may be an important component of decarbonization policies by accelerating or strengthening the impacts of other demand-side measures. Individual actions and policy support are social processes—they are intimately linked to expectations about the actions and beliefs of others. Although prevailing social norms often reinforce the status quo and unsustainable development pathways, social dynamics can also create widespread and rapid shifts in cultural values and practices, including increasing pressure on politicians to enact ambitious policy. We synthesize literature on social-norm influence, measurement, and change from the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. We discuss the opportunities and challenges for the use of social-norm and social-tipping interventions to promote climate action. Social-norm interventions aimed at addressing climate change or other social dilemmas are promising but no panacea. They require in-depth contextual knowledge, ethical consideration, and situation-specific tailoring and testing to understand whether they can be effectively implemented at scale. Our review aims to provide practitioners with insights and tools to reflect on the promises and pitfalls of such interventions in diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars in many disciplines have examined how social movements use the law to create social change. While the study of the law and social movements has largely relied on studies of the US civil rights movement to develop theoretical tools for understanding how movements target the state to create legal changes, none of these studies have examined the legal strategy of the Black Power movement. This article draws on data from a larger project on Black Power law and the National Conference of Black Lawyers to develop the idea of the courtroom as contested space and construct a concept of courtroom resistance. I argue that the courtroom, operating as hegemonic white space, was viewed as a site of contestation by Black Power activists who found creative ways to challenge the legal, ideological, and physical "space" of the courtroom. These conceptual tools open an important avenue for researchers interested in examining the relationship between social movements and the law and how race operates in the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on journalists' professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. Through this research, the Gezi Protests assert their continuing relevance for understanding the relationship between repression and contention, especially in countries hit by the current wave of authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the underrepresentation of Black people in the travel sphere, Black travelers have created their presence in the market – authentically representing and providing opportunities for Black travelers. This group of Black travelers has taken on the collective name of the Black Travel Movement (BTM). Informed by social movement and critical race theory, nine interviews were conducted to better understand what influences BTM leaders in their quest for social change. Three emergent themes resulted: Catalysts Lead to Self-Efficacy, Awareness Leads to Consciousness Raising, and Community Activation Leads to Resource Mobilization. As evident from our interviews with BTM leaders, discrimination, bias, racism, and inequities are ubiquitous and continue to create inhospitable and toxic touristic experiences and landscapes for Black and people of color. However, results reveal a cyclical model that highlights hope through activism and community mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research portrays the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement as predominantly white, dominated by national Washington DC-based policy organizations and recently by white middle-class women seeking stronger gun regulations, overlooking organizing by people in racially oppressed communities. In contrast, we extend the multi-institutional politics approach to social movements to understand how interlocking political, institutional, and cultural systems of domination shape GVP efforts across communities. We develop the concept multisystem logic to analyze the public communications of 10 GVP groups in Connecticut from 2013 to 2018. We identify an intervention logic seeking to interrupt or prevent community gun violence and a gun reform logic promoting change in laws and policies. For gun scholars, our approach makes clear that the GVP movement is not solely focused on policy change but on social change more broadly. We suggest the applicability of our model to a range of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subaltern social groups do not see their conceptualizations of leadership represented by the images of leadership and leaders portrayed in the narratives of the "official" history of their countries. This article draws from the experience of an American Indian summer leadership camp in the United States (US) where memory is used by the organization as a resource for legitimizing their power and leadership perspectives to effect social change. Through a leadership work based on rhetoric and framing to decolonize the dominant history of the US, a process of collective sense and meaning-making is unfolded. This work of leadership builds collective agency that contributes to legitimize both American Indian memories and leadership perspectives. Through legitimacy, subordinated social groups develop the capacity to justify that they hold the power to govern themselves and not just to consent and submit to external actors. Eventually, legitimacy of memory and leadership perspectives can be leveraged as power since the group believes in their potential. Through a critical approach drawing from history and sociology, the study contributes insights to both the social change and the Indigenous leadership literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why neoliberal policies spread across political jurisdictions is a fundamental question for economic geographers and critical policy scholars. Many accounts inspired by the policy mobility approach point to neoliberalism as having a conditioning effect on the ease and speed with which policies transverse the globe. Yet the role that social movements and transnational advocacy networks play in shaping and at times facilitating neoliberal policy diffusion has been under-examined. In this article, I bring a new perspective to the policy mobilities literature, by incorporating insights from radical feminist and critical disability theorising. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, I argue that in their haste to scrutinise and theorise neoliberalism as a project of the Right, policy mobility scholars have neglected the mobilising role of the transnational left. Elements of the Left have leant critical support to market-based models of state restructuring, out of concern for minority rights and the welfare state's denial of individual agency and choice. To illustrate my argument, I use a case study of the disability movement and the policy model of individualised funding, which is driving the current trend towards greater marketisation in the provision of disability services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we break away from a fixation on top-down power dynamics and track the impact of social movements in societies that do not easily fit with Western neoliberal theorisations? Building on Foucault's insights on governance, this article proposes an analytical lens of the 'biopolitics of existence' to address this problem. The term existence refers not simply to the 'corporeal' needs of survival (be it of an individual or an organisation) but also to the freedom to (self-)develop and the ability to interact with others. By examining how the Good Food Movement has transformed the bios of ordinary people into agency and reshaped the governing ethos in China's food system, this article demonstrates that to assess the gravity of social change is to first comprehend how actors calculated their action in a particular socio-political ecology. To speak of the politics of existence is to recognise that existence is simultaneously something to be defended and to be established. A 'biopolitics of existence' lens is instrumental in making visible social actors' logic in (re)forming socio-political norms while keeping in sight the entanglement of different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though sociologists have been interested in how temporal patterns of sociability vary in urban contexts, the study of city-level dynamics at short timescales has been challenging historically. Social media and new computational methods provide a solution. Our study clusters cities using sociality as a metric. We collected three months of social media data to investigate variation in the temporal structure of sociability across American cities. We find that cities cluster into three distinct types ('Coastal', 'Transitional' and 'Heartland') and that geographic proximity together with race, education and language associate with this clustering. Specifically, we found that clusters of Blacker cities tend to tweet more per capita, but also that more highly educated cities tend to tweet less per capita. These findings provide evidence that social media may be facilitating new opportunities to empower traditionally marginalized urban groups, a conclusion relevant to #BlackLivesMatter, the George Floyd protests and other social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do radical movements seeking fundamental social change engage with nearer-term policy dilemmas? Disciplinary boundaries and practical obstacles have limited research into protester policy engagement. Using a hybrid method combining participant-observation and expert-led focus groups, we document activist attitudes concerning controversial climate policy options. Data gathered at 'Climate Camps' in six national contexts are presented alongside evidence from similar 'participant-instigator' events at Green Party conferences. We find activists engaged in direct action outside the established political system had policy knowledge and agendas comparable to or surpassing those active within the system. Support for radical change appears correlated with – rather than opposed to – knowledge and interest in policy agendas. As climate protests escalate it is important to understand 'protester policy engagement' – the processing, production and communication of changes proposed from a position outside the established political system and to theorise this with, rather than in contradistinction to, social movement identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transportation policies, plans, and projects all flow through state institutions because of the substantial cost of infrastructure and the need to assess transportation system performance, including equity implications. But environmental justice scholarship interrogates the state's role in perpetuating injustice. Most research and planning practice related to transportation equity has relied upon state-sponsored analytical methods. Transportation planners and scholars can benefit from critical assessments of these approaches. We propose a shift in focus from transportation equity to a broader consideration of transportation justice that is more closely aligned with models of social change promulgated in the environmental justice literature and by related movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is sport an appropriate forum for activists to engage in political protest? In recent years, this question has been the subject of conversations in households, public spaces such as barbershops and coffee shops, and social media and newsrooms, as various high-profile athletes have used their sport platforms to call attention to various social injustices existing within the US society. The purpose of the following interview is to provide further insight into this intersection between sport and politics and the use of sport as a site for political resistance and social change. Dave Zirin, a critical sports journalist, is the sports editor for The Nation and author of several books on the politics of sport. This interview with Dave Zirin offers a nuanced understanding on the recent occurrences involving athlete activism and the overall use of sport as a site for political activism and social change. Topics covered include race and racism in America, social responsibility, and social movements, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on strategic leadership and governance has long operated under the assumption that strategic leaders' influence and purview are predominantly constrained by organizational boundaries. Recent events and social movements have called this limited view of strategic leadership into question, however. In this editorial commentary, we explore the emerging trend of strategic leaders becoming—in both their own and stakeholders' perceptions—societal leaders advancing social change inside and outside their organizations. We examine the research implications of taking a broader view of these leaders' responsibility, one that reflects evolving social expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article approaches the relationship between the aims of Paulo Freire's education for liberation and the praxis of popular communication in Brazil. The goal is to understand the extent to which aspects of Freire's thoughts can intersperse with concepts and practices of popular, community, and alternative communication in Brazil. The study is based on bibliographic research on Freire's work while reflecting on some of the principles of the education for liberation, particularly those embedding the praxis of popular communication in social movements. This paper concludes by arguing that principles such as 'communication as dialogue', 'critical consciousness', the ability to become a 'subject', 'education as a practice for freedom', 'connection to reality', and 'social transformation' lie prominently in the concept and practices of popular and community communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, a wave of climate change activism emerged in response to calls from scientists for urgent, unprecedented, and far-reaching changes to address the climate crisis. Three social movements, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and the Sunrise Movement, have received the most attention and continue to grow. Synthesizing and integrating Erik Olin Wright's theories of social transformation, the authors apply Wright's work to analyze these movements and identify barriers and opportunities moving forward. While significant forces of social reproduction continue to shape politics and constrain climate action, unintended social consequences combined with new social movements are ripening conditions for transformation. The authors identify non-reformist reforms, a forceful form of symbiotic transformation pushed forward by social movements, as the most likely strategy to address the climate crisis and catalyze broader emancipatory transformation. While climate movements face significant opposition, they continue to grow and create a stronger trajectory for deep social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the newly elected FMLN government of El Salvador launched a comprehensive health reform, which gave the National Health Forum (NHF) a key role in developing community participation. This study aims to examine and analyze the content and impact of this social movement during the study period 2009–2018. The context was analyzed through relevant documents, which helped identify key stakeholders. Semi-structured interviews took place at 3 levels of decision making: the political level, the health professionals, and the community. Data were analyzed using a qualitative methodology. Participation is carried by a structure created by the Ministry of Health, the National Health Forum. The NHF developed 3 strategies: (1) leadership building in the communities through the strengthening of social, political, and economic skills, where they developed social accountability mechanisms at all decision-making levels of the health system; (2) the strategy carried by the sectoral working groups, where they responded to prioritized needs identified by the community; and (3) advocacy for human rights-based policies. The NHF, and its role in the strengthening of the National Public Health System, provides strong evidence of community participation strategies and co-governance with the health system within the social determinants of health scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a very rare phenomenon was observed in Igboland, Southeastern Nigeria—the conversion of the Igbo to Islam. There exists a significant scholarly work on the stages of conversion or conversion process among different people group; however, to the best of our knowledge, little exists on the Igbo conversion to Islam. This could be as a result of the phenomenon being a relatively recent development in Igboland, commencing in the second half of the twentieth century (Uchendu in Soc Sci J 47(1):172–188, 2010). This article seeks to discover the stages of Igbo conversion to Islam; that is, the systematic phases involved in their conversion process to Islam To accomplish this, ethnographic interviews were conducted with thirty (30) former Igbo Christians, all now converts to Islam. Gerlach and Hine's (People, power, change: movements of social transformation, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1970) stages of conversion theory were applied to this study, and the findings showed that Igbo converts to Islam underwent six stages in their conversion process to Islam. These are: "Initial contact with a practicing Muslim; focus of need through demonstration; re-education through group interaction; decision and surrender; commitment event; and group support for changed cognitive and behavioral patterns (consequence)". The findings from this study reveal that tension and crisis do not often begin the stage of disaffiliating from one's original religion as some scholars claim. The study recommends that Igbo Christians should build strong ties with one another so that disaffiliation will not quickly occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has examined straight allyship to the queer community from allies' perspectives, but little is known about how queer people evaluate straight allies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 20 LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) students from a large, public university in the southeastern United States, we show that respondents formulate their expectations by leaning on their understanding of their own queerness in relation to other privileged and marginalized identities they possess. We find two opposing camps of thought: one that allies should be attuned to the individual needs of queer people in their personal lives, and the other that they should be actively dedicated to supporting the broader queer community. Some respondents expressed sentiments of both camps, showcasing how expectations range with diverse identity constellations. We conclude with discussions of how diverse expectations complicate allyship as a vehicle for social change, and the implications of these results for allies' roles in queer rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relevance of militant ethnography as a collaborative and politically engaged form of knowledge production for the study of Latin American social movements. Drawing on my militant ethnographic research with four autonomous groups from Chile and Mexico, the article presents a reflective account of my experience as a militant researcher throughout the different stages of the inquiry. More specifically, I describe the ethical and methodological procedures carried out in the field and their importance in fostering collaboration and horizontality. Furthermore, I discuss the challenges of conducting militant ethnography within Latin American autonomous movements whilst pursuing doctoral studies in a European university and an English-speaking country. Finally, by acknowledging the tensions resulting from my multiple and entangled roles, I suggest an alternative route to militant research that challenges the temporalities and spatialities of traditional research designs and proposes an ongoing process of collaboration and solidarity in the post-fieldwork stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical social movements are broadly engaged in, and dedicated to, promoting change in their social environment. In their corresponding efforts to call attention to various causes, communicate with like-minded groups, and mobilize support for their activities, radical social movements also produce an enormous amount of text. These texts, like radical social movements themselves, are often (i) densely connected and (ii) highly variable in advocated protest activities. Given a corpus of radical social movement texts, can one uncover the underlying network structure of the radical activist groups involved in this movement? If so, can one then also identify which groups (and which subnetworks) are more prone to radical versus mainstream protest activities? Using a large corpus of British radical environmentalist texts (1992–2003), we seek to answer these questions through a novel integration of network discovery and unsupervised topic modeling. In doing so, we apply classic network descriptives (e.g., centrality measures) and more modern statistical models (e.g., exponential random graph models) to carefully parse apart these questions. Our findings provide a number of revealing insights into the networks and nature of radical environmentalists and their texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering contemporary movements as sites of struggle between attempts at inclusiveness and enduring tendencies to exclude and reproduce power hierarchies, this article examines how movement actors confront and tackle inequalities within their organisational spaces. Drawing on an in-depth study, which relied on Participatory Action Research methods, of the intersectional feminist anti-austerity group Sisters Uncut, the article analyses how actors collectively define and translate intersectionality into practice and the challenges they face in enacting this form of politics, which the authors call intersectional prefiguration. The authors consider intersectional prefiguration as a form of radical democratic politics which acknowledges relations of domination and seeks to transform them within both movements and society. The article discusses how enacting intersectional prefiguration is predicated on actors developing a collective identity, embracing a commitment to organise intersectionally, and adopting specific methodologies through which to do so. The findings have relevance to scholars of social movements and intersectionality and can help advance our understandings of the ways in which movements, prefigurative and otherwise, drive social change and transformative politics and the challenges they face in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses participant observation to examine how an all‐female collective in Los Angeles uses urban cycling culture as a way to contest inequalities and advocate for social change in communities of color. Bridging the literatures on gentrification and social movements, I examine how the collective uses the bicycle as a unifying tool to draw disparate individuals together and, through the group's practices and rituals, generates a shared sense of collective identity and politicized consciousness embedded within the uneven spatial development of Los Angeles. I demonstrate how this politicized consciousness drives a collective spirit of resistance that challenges gentrification by reimagining and re‐embodying space through organized actions and everyday practices. I find that organized anti‐gentrification resistance is not merely reactionary, but rather entails pre‐figurative action and visioning for space and community. Overall, findings speak more broadly to how communities of color facing exclusion and marginalization make claims to space and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ' décroissance ' (degrowth) signifies a process of political and social transformation that reduces a society's material and energy use while improving the quality of life. Degrowth calls for decolonizing imaginaries and institutions from – in Ursula Le Guin's words – 'a one-way future consisting only of growth'. Recent scholarship has focused on the ecological and social costs of growth, on policies that may secure prosperity without growth, and the study of grassroots alternatives pre-figuring a post-growth future. There has been limited engagement, however, with the geographical aspects of degrowth. This special issue addresses this gap, looking at the rooted experiences of peoples and collectives rebelling against, and experimenting with alternatives to, growth-based development. Our contributors approach such resurgent or 'nowtopian' efforts from a decolonial perspective, focusing on how they defend and produce new places, new subjectivities and new state relations. The stories told span from the Indigenous territories of the Chiapas in Mexico and Adivasi communities in southern India, to the streets of Athens, the centres of power in Turkey and the riverbanks of West Sussex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decolonization of the social imaginary has been proposed as an important dimension of the transition towards a degrowth society. However, although omnipresent in the degrowth literature, the terms "social imaginary" and "social imaginary significations" have not been adequately explained. This creates a level of mystification that limits the analytical value of the degrowth framework. In addition, there is very little theoretical work on how actual social imaginaries can be decolonized and transformed. This paper first tries to clarify those concepts. Subsequently, it develops a theoretical framework for explaining such transitions of the imaginary. In developing this framework, the paper focuses on moments of crisis, since crises have been historically associated with change and transition. It argues that crises are important because they destabilize social imaginaries and open up a stage of suspension—a liminal stage—in which the rise of new social practices can facilitate the emergence of new social imaginary significations and institutions that can contribute to the alteration of the social imaginary at large. The paper draws on case studies related to the Greek crisis, the biggest ever faced by a country of the Global North after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The call to transform the growth society lacks an analysis of the human will. Problematically for degrowth, the enactment of this so-called will to transform has undesired matter-energetic consequences. Every act of transformation requires matter–energy, adding to the cumulative throughput of societies. To revert the ecospherical metabolism from a state of overshoot to one of degrowth, a metamorphosis in being is proposed. Building on Heidegger's fundamental ontology, the article invites degrowth practitioners to become releasers by waiting for the unexpected and then to prepare for the expected, the collapse of civilization. A practice of releasement, where meditative thinking resides, is considered as an effective way to counter the destructive will to transform, and hence contribute to degrowth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on art and social movements focuses on the representational aspect of art, leaving untouched how artwork informs audiences and actors on the mobilization dynamics permeating the field of action. In this article the authors contend that the analysis of art in social movements should pursue the ways in which collective actors place art as part of their interpretative lens to act upon changing social conditions. The article's analysis of art around the DREAMers Movement suggests that artwork allows for movement actors to change the limits of their cultural context and affect the repertoires of articulations conceived within that context. This analysis moves beyond the notions of art as representation and presents art as a field to challenge the forms and dynamics of mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political philosophers’ prescriptions for poverty alleviation have overlooked the importance of social movements led by, and for, the poor in the global South. I argue that these movements are normatively and politically significant for poverty reduction strategies and global justice generally. While often excluded from formal political processes, organized poor communities nonetheless lay the groundwork for more radical, pro-poor forms of change through their grassroots resistance and organizing. Poor-led social movements politicize poverty by insisting that, fundamentally, it is caused by social relations of power that exploit and subordinate poor populations. These movements and their organizations also develop the collective capabilities of poor communities in ways that help them to contest the structures and processes that perpetuate their needs deprivation. I illustrate these contributions through a discussion of the Landless Rural Worker’s Movement in Brazil (the MST), a poor mobilization organization in Bangladesh (Nijera Kori), and the slum and pavement dweller movement in India. Global justice theorizing about poverty cannot just “add on” the contributions of such struggles to existing analyses of, and remedies for, poverty, however; rather, we will need to shift to a relational approach to poverty in order to see the vital importance of organized poor communities to transformative, poor-centered poverty reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how alternative economic organizations can fight inequality without help from traditional partners such as social movement organizations. We focus on co-operatives' successful battle against corporate dominance in the Québec funeral industry. We analyse their actions through the lens of Nancy Fraser's tridimensional theory of justice, which utilizes the cultural dimension of recognition, political dimension of representation, and economic dimension of distribution. We demonstrate how funeral co-ops empowered their federation to influence institutional inequality while maintaining a co-op identity by embodying the potentially contradictory flexibility of social movements along with co-op principles. This paper contributes to scholarship on collective social action by exploring the dual role of model and movement played by secondary co-ops such as the federation of Québec funeral co-ops, which draws on local institutional and organizational resources to disrupt unfair structures. We also extend Fraser's theory, using it as a framework for understanding the dynamic relationships between inequality and its potential remedies at different levels of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, catalogs of protest events have been at the heart of research on social movements. To measure how protest changes over time or varies across space, sociologists usually count the frequency of events, as either the dependent variable or a key independent variable. An alternative is to count the number of participants in protest. This article investigates demonstrations, strikes, and riots. Their size distributions manifest enormous variation. Most events are small, but a few large events contribute the majority of protesters. When events are aggregated by year or by city, the correlation between total participation and event frequency is low or modest. The choice of how to quantify protest is therefore vital; findings from one measure are unlikely to apply to another. The fact that the bulk of participation comes from large events has positive implications for the compilation of event catalogs. Rather than worrying about the underreporting of small events, concentrate on recording large ones accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends Scandrett et al.’s conceptual framework for social movement learning to understand learning and knowledge creation in the climate justice movement. Drawing on radical pluralist theoretical approaches to social movement learning, learning in the climate justice movement is conceptualized at the micro, meso, and macro levels, along two continua of (a) unorganized and organized learning and (b) individual and collective learning. Two critical themes of learning about power and learning about place are used as examples to illustrate learning across the three levels. Article conclusions discuss strengths and limitations of the conceptual framework and directions for further research to better understand adult learning within the climate justice movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]