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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]

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]

This article discusses the dominance of scholarship from North America, Europe, and Oceania in the field of International Studies (IS) and the need to include perspectives from the Global South. The limited number of eligible scholars and practitioners in the Global South, as well as the legacy of colonial education, contribute to the lack of theoretical production from this region. The article argues for the importance of globalizing the archive of International Studies theories to include diverse perspectives and experiences. It examines the contributions of Cheikh Anta Diop and Walter Rodney, two scholars from the Global South, and how their ideas can be applied cross-regionally to explain universal dynamics. [Extracted from the article]

This essay takes, as its starting point, Andreas Malm's effort, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire , to legitimize and normalize property destruction in the context of the climate movement. The sabotage of energy infrastructures, I counter, cannot make sense, for it poses a threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. Recent protests entailing the defacement of paintings share with ecocriticism an investment in an essentially liberal, pedagogical and moral covenant, one that urges witnesses to undergo an individual process of reflection in order to acquire or affirm values and priorities friendlier to the environment. Sabotage, by contrast, violates this covenant; blowing up a pipeline may be said to have met its goals by reducing and slowing the supply of oil, regardless of what the public learned from sabotage's mediatization. Drawing on psychoanalytic accounts of aesthetic education, I argue that sabotage introduces absurdity into a category—action—that the climate movement otherwise insists is self-identical. Sabotage does this by subtracting the world wherein putatively future-bound actions, including having and raising a child, mean what they do. I test out this claim in a reading of Nell Zink's novel The Wallcreeper and Benedikt Erlingsson's film Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð), two absurdist comedies that formally amplify the semiotic crisis induced by sabotage and, in so doing, enable us to confront the necessary dislocation of politics from sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth—people ages of 15–24 years—are at the forefront of present-day social movements focused on climate justice, civic activation, gun reform, and racial justice. Social movements occur when people with a shared purpose come together to take collective action in order to achieve a social justice goal. This article examines how youth-organized social movements not only propel individual and collective action but also actively support and sustain youth well-being. We define well-being as feeling positive, socially connected, and purposeful. We explore social movement practices for promoting individual and collective youth well-being. This research builds on dual insights: (1) the well-being practices of youth social movement organizers and (2) the extant literature in consumer research and its associated disciplines. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer research that advance our understanding of youth well-being and raise questions to encourage more researchers to investigate how social movements support youth well-being and well-doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the connections between documenta fifteen, an art exhibition in Germany, and the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African, and Latin American Films in Uzbekistan. It explores questions about the geographical scope, circulation of ethnographic images, self-organization, and research-based art. The essay emphasizes the internationalist genealogies and nostalgia in the curatorial approach of ruangrupa, the organization behind documenta fifteen, and discusses the complexities of exhibiting art from the Global South in the West. It also discusses the work of artist Saodat Ismailova and her films that recreate pre-Islamic rituals, raising questions about the sources of knowledge used in their creation. The essay explores the intersection of art and political activism, highlighting the Tashkent Film Festival as an example of a sociopolitical event that opposed hierarchies and competition. It emphasizes the importance of collective activism and the creation of ideal working conditions as a form of resistance against neoliberal cultural funding and the precarity of artistic work. The text also discusses the Tashkent Film Festival's role in promoting Third World cinema and international solidarity, particularly regarding the Palestinian cause. It explores the concept of research-based art and its relationship to historical narratives and the construction of knowledge. [Extracted from the article]

In this article we examine three transnational women's movements in countries currently led by dictators—Nicaragua, Russia, and China—to uncover lessons they might offer feminist activists across the world as authoritarian regimes increase in the context of globalization. Although the rise in feminist action within these countries paralleled social movement mobilization elsewhere, what distinguishes feminist activism in these three countries is the national political context in which they each operated: a demonstrably repressive turn in which feminist activities became dangerous. In the three countries under investigation, the leaders' rise to power included feminist repression. To understand how these three different states could evolve from encouraging feminist action to engaging in strategic repression a decade later, we examine oral history interviews with feminist activists in Nicaragua, Russia, and China that were recorded as part of the Global Feminisms Project. Thus, we had thirty-seven unique first-person accounts of the period in question from the perspective of feminist activists. Our analysis suggests that these states employed three mechanisms that disempowered the women's movement over time: suppression of the international flow of ideas and funding, state control of the media, and public criminalization of dissent and activism. We focus on the first as critical to transnational feminism and review the other two as enhancing the effort to suppress the flow of ideas, people, and funding. Among other implications, the conclusion suggests that to protect feminist activism, we directly work to protect the free flow of ideas and funds across national boundaries, as well as a freely operating media that conveys accurate information, and freedom of protest and dissent where they currently exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, Brazil's "pro-life" movement has increasingly invested in efforts to promote recognition of the juridical personhood of the "unborn," making it a key vehicle to advance its political vision and mobilize its constituents. The agenda has crystallized most clearly around various legislative proposals to institute a so-called Statute of the Unborn (Estatuto do Nascituro), which would effectively recognize fetuses and embryos as full citizens in the country, codifying rights that would trump those of other juridical subjects, particularly women. In this article, we offer a genealogy of this recent turn in pro-life activism, situating it at the nexus of shifting national and transnational political and organizational networks. In doing so, we build on a feminist literature linking constructions of fetal personhood with the diffusion of reproductive technologies, understanding these broadly to include not just biomedical technologies but also technologies of reproductive governance. Drawing on archival research, we begin by tracing how Brazilian antiabortion activists' historic articulation with transnational pro-life, "pro-family" networks facilitated their appropriation of transnational technologies of reproductive governance, contributing directly to their current strategic prioritization of the juridical rights and personhood of the unborn. We then explore the contours of national debates on the matter through an analysis of various bills to codify these, introduced to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies since 1978. We pay particular attention to debates surrounding the proposed statute, underscoring its resonance with broader social movement strategies associated with identity politics and vulnerable groups in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories can inspire and propel people's individual and collective action to unite social movements. In this article, we outline key social movement storytelling practices and integrate them with insights from academic research to build a framework for understanding how stories unite social movements. This framework includes research-supported storytelling practices for two types of essential social movement stories: individual me and movement we stories. Stories of me are the personal stories of individual changemakers. Stories of we are the stories that these individuals tell about the movement. We identify how individual changemakers' me stories intersect with and strengthen a movement's we story. Finally, we highlight insights that deepen our conceptual and practical understanding of social movement storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barndt commends Allen most of all for how her example prompts us to consider and choose among many possible ways of pursuing both intellectual insights and the achievement of common goods, rather than presenting Allen's way as the model that all political theorists, much less all academics, should follow. Keywords: Danielle Allen; democracy; justice; civic education; human well-being EN Danielle Allen democracy justice civic education human well-being 836 843 8 10/03/23 20231001 NES 231001 When I entered graduate school at Harvard in 1975 as part of a strongly felt but ill-specified quest for personal and political meaning, I had no clear sense of what constituted "academic success.". [Extracted from the article]

Earle J. Fischer's book, "The Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Prophetic Tradition," reintroduces Cleage's 1969 text, "The Black Messiah," and explores its significance in tackling the whiteness of religion and theology. Fischer's analysis includes a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating African American studies and the Black prophetic tradition. The book examines Cleage's life, his theological and rhetorical treatise, and his efforts to reinterpret Christianity in an Afrocentric framework. Fischer's work is seen as an important contribution to religious, communication, rhetoric, Black Power studies, and African American studies. However, some readers may find that the analysis is disproportionately framed in an Afrocentric context and lacks clear definitions of essential terms. [Extracted from the article]

"Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement" by Irvin J. Hunt is a historical exploration of African American mutual aid cooperatives in the United States from 1918 to 1976. The book focuses on four key figures and offers social movements as critical theory. Hunt emphasizes the everyday acts of motion and refusal within these cooperatives, challenging conventional notions of progress and success. He frames social movement participants as aesthetic theorists, highlighting the artistic nature of their practices and their search for novel ideas. The Black cooperative is portrayed as a fugitive form, a series of historically situated riffs rather than a single movement. [Extracted from the article]

For example, throughout the chapter, Mayes demonstrates the bifurcation of special education by contrasting the exclusivity of "learning disabled" as a category that only applied to a small group of white students, against "educable mentally retarded", which was rapidly being applied to Black children. In I The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education i , Keith A. Mayes disentangles the nexus of ideology, scientific research, and policy that constructed racialized disability in education over the twentieth century. This may be why, after Mayes ends the book with a quote from disability advocate Burton Blatt, I was left with an urge to "do" and a desire for Mayes to tell me what is next. [Extracted from the article]

The transition to neoliberal hegemony during the last quarter of the twentieth century is generally portrayed as a contest between Hayekians and Keynesians. This portrayal overlooks the brief but potent effervescence of the neo-Malthusian movement. Biologists Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and Donella Meadows led a social movement that pursued environmentalist governance wherein scarce resources and population growth were managed by command-and-control instruments, Pigouvian taxation, and coercion. The neoclassical mainstream of economics conceded to the neo-Malthusian upstarts that if a "backstop" energy source was not discovered, then there were indeed "limits to growth," but neoliberals eventually devised alternative environmental frameworks, such as Elinor Ostrom's "commons" and John Dales's "cap-and-trade." The first significant clash between neoliberals and neo-Malthusians came in the form of a bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich over commodity prices during the 1980s. This article reconstructs the broader context of their confrontation, as well as the theoretical influences on Simon's cornucopian framework of "resourceship." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Reagan's landslide 1984 reelection isolated urban centers in the United States as sites of domestic resistance to Reagan's ascendant conservative hegemony. Black (and Latine and queer White) artists and activists located in major cities who rejected (and were rejected by) the "Reagan Revolution" contested their symbolic erasure from the polity by establishing conceptual spaces—sonic, literary, organizational, and otherwise—where they might defy the assertions of US right-wing conservatism. Musicians Tracy Chapman and Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) of the hip-hop group Public Enemy exemplify the choice that some Black artists made to produce politicized art that sought to refute conservative rhetoric. Chapman and Chuck D mobilize a sonic counterpolitics of nostalgia that allowed them to connect the messages embedded in their music to sounds associated with important social movements from the recent past in order to resist the conservative politics that dominated the Black 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Anti-extradition Movement in Hong Kong, a wave of new unions surfaced—18 newly registered unions in 2019 and 491 in the first half of 2020. This article examines and analyzes the factors behind this upsurge in new union activism and asks how protesters acquired trade union consciousness. Previously, in the throes of an earlier protest movement in 2014 led by young people who valued individualism, self-activism, spontaneity, and post-materialism, hierarchically structured institutions were distrusted and scorned, including trade unions. Yet half a decade later, during the 2019–20 protest movement, many thousands of participants joined forces to form the new unions. These took the shape of a new type of union known in labor studies as "social movement unionism." Despite having little experience, the new unions were able to sustain themselves, and some began to engage not only with political activism but also with management-labor issues and worker rights. This article draws on extensive interviewing during 2020–22 with labor activists and trade union organizers from old and new unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After her confirmation, President Biden declared, "We're going to look back and see this as a moment of real change in American history."[3] Not only is Justice Jackson the first Black woman to serve on the Court, but with her addition, the Court has greater gender and racial diversity than at any time in history. This residency requirement continues to this day and has been extended to require courts of appeals judges to live in their circuits.[24] This suggests that judges should have an understanding of local culture and values, and that this understanding benefits rather than undermines their roles as judges. Keywords: Supreme Court; political representation; race; ethnicity; gender EN Supreme Court political representation race ethnicity gender 380 388 9 03/28/23 20230401 NES 230401 The appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in April 2022 was a meaningful sign of progress. 3 Joe Biden, " Remarks by President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Senate's Historic, Bipartisan Confirmation of Judge Jackson to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court", April 8, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/04/08/remarks-by-president-biden-vice-president-harris-and-judge-ketanji-brown-jackson-on-the-senates-historic-bipartisan-confirmation-of-judge-jackson-to-be-an-associate-justice-of-the-supreme-court/. [Extracted from the article]

This article highlights the political work Indigenous activists in Thailand carried out in recent years in claiming Indigenous status and pressing for legal and political recognition by the Thai state. I frame this work as a form of "multiculturalism from below" geared more toward inclusion and accommodation than sovereignty and decolonization. This makes the movement distinct from many other parts of the Indigenous world. I further frame the activists' movement as a form of "governmentality from below" in that they are adopting a highly conscious strategy of self-surveying and self-enumeration that aims to define and render visible Thailand's diversity while legitimizing their cultural claims and performances of Indigeneity. This case drives home the point that Indigeneity is a highly malleable concept that, while usable by different groups of people in different moments, brings with it constraints and possibilities reflecting the nature of relations between those groups and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently a dearth of research on the creation and the implications of Black educational space, even with the increased awareness raised by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to the individual and structural antiblackness inherent in the United States. This essay aims to share the BLM history that helped to motivate and inform two Black college educators' construction of Black educational space. The analysis reveals that a pro-Black political imagination is required to authentically and meaningfully engage in centering, supporting, and honoring Black people in classroom spaces and beyond. The article shares reflections from the two educators' about their experiences of constructing Black educational spaces. In doing so, this work attempts to motivate concrete pro-Black action by disrupting standardized academic practices in making commitments to ourselves, our students, and our communities. This work is significant insofar as it contributes to international debates about the purposes of education, and it reimagines how pedagogy can be operationalized to transform classrooms in global educational contexts into sites for Black Healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between Black social movements in Brazil and the United States through over a century of formations of struggle. Drawing from a review of Black periodicals in three time periods ranging from twentieth-century print press to contemporary digital social media, this article affirms the significance of the transnational Black struggle; demonstrates the ways in which knowledge and language about Black struggle has been circulated, exchanged, and produced within a dynamic and shifting relationship; and analyzes ways that US and Brazilian Black movements have served as educators for one another and their own societies. We argue that understanding the contemporary moment of antiracist struggles requires examining the longer and nuanced relationship between US and Brazilian Black activism. This deepening, critical relationship fortified the Black movement as educator of society and reframes how we understand the global Movement for Black Lives as a historical and transnational phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1969 and 1979 the Australian women's liberation movement was richly entangled with Vietnamese and Chinese Communism. While this social movement has been substantially critiqued for its privileging of white women, this article considers a moment when women did work across racial and political difference, albeit imperfectly. Australian socialist feminists were directly inspired by Vietnamese and Chinese women, considering them tantalizing evidence of a woman-friendly communist utopia. But other feminists were entangled in ways that were less tightly woven and more surprising; for example, through the technique of consciousness-raising. Feminists also projected their desire for global sisterhood onto Vietnamese and Chinese women. Yet face-to-face visits reveal that East Asian feminists were not just a site for Australian feminist projections. As representatives of state women's organizations, East Asian Communist women acted strategically to construct Vietnam and China as gender equal in the eyes of Australian visitors. This assertion of equality went largely unquestioned due to the revered place testimony occupied in the women's liberation movement. Yet women's differences were exposed in moments of bafflement during these visits. These are animated as moments of productive confusion; they are productive because they reveal the differences between women. Finally, Communist state feminists are not exceptionalized and are compared to Australian state feminists or "femocrats." I find their agency similarly limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, many brands tried to convey their support of #BLM (Black Lives Matter) on social media (Blackout Tuesday). Some brands engaged in performative allyship (expressing allyship in words only), whereas other brands expressed support through words and deeds (true allyship). This research tests whether true versus performative brand allyship matters to consumers. We show that for the period following Blackout Tuesday, true ally brands performed better than performative ally brands and neutral brands (staying silent). Two experiments show that true ally brands are evaluated more positively than performative ally brands and that this effect is mediated by self-esteem and self-brand connection but moderated by race (greater effect of true allyship for Black consumers than White consumers). These findings suggest that brands have little to gain from acting as performative allies, and even less so toward the communities most affected by social injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing criminalization of dissent and protest in Western liberal democracies received relatively little attention in the past but is now becoming a significant field of research within criminology and the social sciences more generally. The specialist literature can usefully be linked to a wider literature that extends to work on protest policing and social movements and to sociolegal analyses of criminalization. There is a striking connection, still relatively unexplored, between criminalization of ordinary crime and urban marginality and criminalization of protest. Both are often treated by policy makers as serious threats to the use of public space in the neoliberal city and are increasingly being dealt with by means of similar criminal and noncriminal measures. The literature on the "punitive turn," mostly related to street crime, for example, provides theoretical insights and concepts that illuminate efforts to understand punitive responses to activists in the context of profit-driven neoliberal societies. Recent experience and research, particularly in Spain, Italy, and England and Wales, demonstrate these processes of criminalization and the existence of strong similarities between punitive methods targeting ordinary crime, urban marginality and disorder, and political protest, including recent eco-activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnographic study of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH; Platform of People Affected by Mortgages) social movement in Lleida (Spain), this article analyzes the role of activist capital within the movement. Detecting the forms that capital takes among the agents makes it possible to delimit the internal power positions occupied by the participants. Depending on who occupies these positions of power, different internal and external formats and strategies are adopted by the movement, which modifies its trajectory. Thus, depending on this variable, we can determine what position the social movement has occupied in each historical moment in the space of social movements. The article applies the theoretical tools of activist capital and the space of social movements to understand how movements function internally and what power relations are produced between activists, and in this way it analyzes and breaks down the formats that this activist capital adopts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research without social movements is nontransformative, and social movements without research can lead societies toward harmful social and political movements that result in authoritarian, extremist social, economic, and political structures. Keywords: high-impact research; antiracist and antioppressive research; social movements EN high-impact research antiracist and antioppressive research social movements 645 661 17 01/09/23 20221201 NES 221201 This invited article is based on the 2022 Aaron Rosen Lecture - "Healing Humanity: Leading through Innovation and our Courage to Change" - presented by Jorge Delva at the Society for Social Work and Research 26th Annual Conference held January 12-16, 2022, in Washington, DC. We will circle back later to how these events relate to high-impact social work research and social movements, but for now, we share these examples to illustrate the point that research without social movements is nontransformative, and social movements without research result in societies that lean toward harmful authoritarian, extremist social, economic, and political structures. The point is that without research that is deeply rooted in community needs and voices, and without linking our research to social movements - learning about social movements to inform our research and intentionally using research findings to inform social movements - social work's progress in promoting social justice will be limited. [Extracted from the article]

Economic governance typically deploys policy frameworks linked to a model of the economy, but how a policy model is established and changes are questions that continue to puzzle analysts. The authority of the neoliberal model has been explained by the durability of the policy ecology of professional economists and policymakers, but this paper shows that a wider lens on agents and a longer time horizon reveals the emergence of an alternative policy model since the Great Recession that has influenced the new administration in Washington. This paper adapts arguments from the sociology of fields and movements and from pragmatist theories of action to show how the institutional redoubts of policymaking can be breached. Individuals and groups that institutions frame as passive takers of rules and fillers of roles in fact innovate in their daily lives. Social justice organizations have mobilized this dispersed mundane resource to expand the scope for action, but it required time for social learning and organizational innovation. Since 2009, social justice organizations and allies among unions, think tanks, and foundations have coalesced to win employment policy reforms by state and local governments. Their alternative narrative of an equitable economy has been increasingly adopted by Washington policy experts and the Biden Democratic Party. A key to whether the new configuration engineers a change in the national neoliberal model is the degree to which the new Democratic administration's decisions are oriented by the equitable growth model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waggoner's research and teaching interests span US literature and culture, feminist disability studies, queer and trans studies, health activisms, and African American studies. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth-century histories of empire, migration, feminism, and Afro-diasporic activism in the Americas. B Serena Bassi b is visiting professor in Italian studies at Hamilton College. [Extracted from the article]

The paradox of rights in brief: The Scylla and Charybdis for rights-oriented identity politics involves gaining universal rights on the basis of being persons or contouring rights to the historically specific social powers constituting a group's subjection. I States of Injury i was composed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time featuring a markedly different political and intellectual landscape from our own. Fortunately, Jackson notes, in stark contrast with the 1990s, challenging capitalism in the name of both justice and futurity is exactly what Left mobilizations around the world are now doing.[30] Time, then, to return I States of Injury i to the shelf. Still, I wonder if Jackson clipped the wings of his critique of the treatment of rights in I States of Injury. i Might his appreciation of certain rights as permitting heretofore excluded groups to exercise collective power be extended to other social rights?. [Extracted from the article]

This article asks what New Left era liberation theory can illuminate about capitalism, corporate power, and minority oppression in American politics today. Over the past forty years, rising rates of legal rights and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons have accompanied parallel trends in economic immiseration and business influence in politics. Given that sexual and gender minorities are disproportionately affected by economic inequalities, scholars and activists alike have invoked the New Left experience to distinguish a radical liberation politics from an assimilationist and pluralist interest-group agenda. They have done so with the expectation that liberation theory offers a robust account of capitalism, patriarchy, and racial oppression's interlocking natures as well as a means of charting a path beyond this uneven egalitarianism. In reassessing the legacy of New Left political thought, this article posits that such accounts—which have cast capitalism as a system maintaining a strict regulation of gender and sexual conformity and have exalted the wealth redistributionist potential of identity-based movements—are ill-equipped to explain the complex relationship between corporate power and minority political struggles. Throughout, the article draws out lessons for those seeking to interpret and to transform the uneven egalitarian state of contemporary American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State" by Runya Qiaoan explores the effectiveness of advocacy groups in an authoritarian state. Qiaoan introduces the concept of "cultural resonance" to explain how advocacy groups can change minds and persuade policymakers by aligning their framing strategies with the audience's understanding of the issue. The book presents eight cases, including four environmental cases, and uses a combination of case study and process tracing to provide detailed analysis. While the evidence presented is not always clear and concrete, Qiaoan's work contributes to our understanding of policy advocacy and lays a foundation for future research in this area. [Extracted from the article]

Recent social movements have called for an end to mass incarceration and the diversion of funds from police and carceral institutions to social services. However, such a restructuring is limited without addressing the commonplace collaborations between criminal justice actors and social service practitioners. In an interview study with 66 social service providers who offer services to formerly incarcerated people, we examine practitioners' relationships with the criminal justice system. Participants overwhelmingly report a reliance on direct collaboration with the criminal justice system to address a multiplicity of barriers people face when returning home to cities with weak social and economic infrastructures. Participants also described a moral frame situating themselves as mediators amid tensions between community members and the criminal justice system. Social service providers' deep financial, logistical, and ideological entrenchment across the criminal justice system has several implications for the afterlife of mass incarceration and the capacity to reimagine justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identities and identity politics play a significant role in the lives of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Using empirical qualitative research with focus groups as the primary research method, this article is a critical investigation into the ways in which Syrian refugees in Lebanon are simultaneously politicized through their everyday lived experiences yet depoliticized through humanitarian policy and practice. In particular, the article explores how the politicization/depoliticization dichotomy impacts Syrian refugees' access to and experiences within higher education opportunities made available for them in Lebanon. The article argues that humanitarianism's inattentiveness to intersectional identities and social hierarchies of power has often resulted in physical and psychological educational exclusions and reinforced existing inequalities and fissures/divisions between different groups of refugees. In this way, higher education for refugees has often fallen short of its potential to transform lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B V Varun Chaudhry b is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. B Sharon Tran b is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is also affiliate faculty in gender, women's and sexuality studies, and Asian studies. B S. Y. Cheung b is a feminist science studies scholar and an anthropologist of gender, medicine, and the body in East Asia. [Extracted from the article]

V. P. Franklin, Dionne Danns, Gael Graham, Jon Hale, Dwayne C. Wright, Jill Titus, Jeanne Theoharis, Kathryn Schumaker, Dara Walker, and others have revealed the contours of high school student activism in postwar America. Although these scholars have explicated how students contributed to social movements, less attention has been paid to the consequences of activism. To illuminate those consequences, this article examines the rise and fall of Black studies at the desegregated Lane High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. In both higher education and K–12 contexts, the creation of Black studies stemmed from student activism. However, students at Lane High School had less input regarding course instructors, curriculum, and pedagogy than their peers in higher education. Furthermore, the lack of institutional support from both the high school adminsitrators and the Charlottesville City Schools undermined the Black studies elective course's chances for success and led to its eventual demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk carries unique significance for democratic politics today as it faces the challenges of rising inequality, neoliberalism, and systemic racism. To show how, the article divides "risk" into two complementary political models: a technocratic logic of risk allocation, concerned primarily with safety, and a forensic logic of risk attribution, concerned with holding risk takers to account. Both have had pervasive effects on a transformed welfare state, increasingly focused on "personal responsibility" and privatized risk-management. But risk has also played a key role in the way post-1968 movements have organized and challenged the logic of privatization. Risk-based movements, the article argues, especially from the political margins, are key agents in promoting a new political form founded on risk attribution. The article focuses on the exemplary case of the American environmental justice movement in the 1980s–90s as it reframed social justice around three core demands: accountability from decision makers, equitable risk distribution, and broad participation in decisions about danger and communities' well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary democracies feature an increasingly diverse and complex variety of democratic practices. The systematic observation of these practices offers a valuable yet neglected source of insight for current debates on democratic systems and for institutional design. Taking democratic practices as the starting point for theorization counters the tendency to think that democracy has some sort of fixed core around which a political system should be organized. Drawing from literature on democratic practices in social movements and democratic innovations, I illustrate three ways to advance institutional design in the wake of the systemic turn. First, I call for greater attention to the role of political actors in institutional innovation. Second, I show how to better address issues of temporality in institutional design. Third, I introduce the concept of democratic assemblage as a means to understand and reform democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly debates over precarity are gaining unprecedented visibility across fields. From labor insecurity forming a growing dangerous class to the existential condition of vulnerability induced by millennial capitalism, precarity has become an object of both empirical study and theoretical reflection. While European social movements have been organizing and writing about precarity from the late 1970s to today, still, from the US perspective, the term precarity might be mistakenly taken as strictly a scholarly invention. "Precarious Writings" offers an important corrective to the ways that precarity has been taken up in anthropology and cognate disciplines, addressing the specific epistemological and political limitations of existing usages and returning the concept to its overlooked grassroots history in social movement struggles in southern Europe. By returning precarity to these activist roots, this paper makes the case for the recognition of social movements as knowledge producers as well as sources of theoretical insight and innovation in their own right. By failing to recognize precarity's development within contentious struggles, scholarly uses miss how the activist notion enables identity reformulations toward a kind of "precarity pride." That is, the politicization of insecurity has become a source for nurturing a fluid space of political creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through media analysis and extensive interviews, Bondes identifies 39 cases of contention against local incinerator facilities, mainly clustered in the Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou metropolitan areas. In I Chinese Environmental Contention i , Maria Bondes proposes a networked contention model that she outlines and then supports over six chapters, including three case study chapters drawn from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Bondes argues that the likelihood of linkages declines with decreasing openness of the political and media environment, a lower presence of intermediaries in the region, resource-poor communities, and less proximity to other cases. [Extracted from the article]

For the Rage special issue, feminist and legal scholar Sarah Deer (Muscogee [Creek]), University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, and Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw), associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, engage in a powerful roundtable conversation moderated by the Rage special issue editors Harvard feminist professor Durba Mitra and UCLA feminist professor Sarah Haley. In their rich exchange, we learn of the role of rage in Indigenous feminisms today. The roundtable explores critical issues for thinking the feminist, queer, and trans politics of rage among Indigenous communities—sexual violence, settler dispossession, the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, survival in the face of institutional and social violence, and the importance of Indigenous solidarity with social movements for Black lives in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moreover, despite the White House's public relations offensive on behalf of immigration reform, public opinion in the spring of 1965 showed that most Americans favored decreased or unchanged immigration levels.[40] Facing a major logjam and eager to convince the public that his reform plan was not revolutionary, Johnson and pro-immigration lawmakers struck a bargain with Ervin and his restriction-minded colleagues on an annual ceiling for Western Hemisphere immigration.[41] Propelled by compromises on the admissions preference system and a new ceiling on Western Hemisphere immigration, the INA scrapped the national origins quota system, increased annual visas for immigrants originating in the Eastern Hemisphere, and imposed a new ceiling on Western Hemisphere immigration. "In no other realm of our national life", Truman told the public, "are we so hampered and stultified by the dead hand of the past, as we are in this field of immigration."[28] Eisenhower was equally frustrated during his eight years in office, lecturing Congress about the need to liberalize US immigration laws.[29] Immigration reform became a highly salient issue on the national agenda following the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, who vowed to change the nation's immigration laws. Swayed by these pro-immigration forces, President William Howard Taft vetoed the literacy-test bill, which spelled its demise.[16] Frustrated for years by a potent coalition of pro-immigration ethnic and business groups, the political fortunes of the immigration restriction movement changed with the onset of the First World War. [Extracted from the article]