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Though recent waves of large-scale street protests have not directly targeted the business sector, they can still represent a major development in a company's external environment. Building on the literature on community embeddedness, this study extends activism-as-information theory to understand how and when companies respond to street protests that take place in their communities. We argue that for business leaders, the scale of protests serves as an information update regarding the changing relevance of the protested social issue in a community. Using data from 2017 to 2020 on Women's March protests in the United States, we show that the scale of street protests in local communities is associated with the likelihood of subsequent female director appointments for corporations headquartered in those communities: larger-scale protests are associated with a higher likelihood of such appointments. Further, we show that this response to proximal protests is heightened for protests that occur in local communities least aligned with the protest movement and for companies least internally aligned with the protest goals. Our theory and findings extend research on social movements in markets, showing how and why organizations respond to diffuse community protests, and they enrich corporate governance research on the roles of communities and stakeholders in shaping board composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study was to extend the contemporary athlete activism literature by (a) exploring athlete activism beyond a strictly North American context and (b) examining how athlete activism at an organizational/institutional level (i.e., sport organization) may be framed differently than activist efforts at an individual level (i.e., athlete). By examining two examples of activism in German soccer, we show that the framing of both athlete-enacted and organization-enacted examples of activism highlighted the importance of speaking up when human rights are violated, called for the display of solidarity, and discussed the broader political implications for such protests. Additionally, framing of both examples of activism included voices of criticism regarding the sport organizations governing global sport. As calls for accountability of sport organizations suppressing athlete expression are becoming increasingly common in global sport, this study adds to a shifting focus of activism research targeting the sport institutions that often perpetuate the various injustices individual athletes call attention to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spring 2024, the half century tradition of college administrations letting peaceful protest flourish unobstructed on campuses across the U.S., came to a sudden and violent end as one college president after another called in armed riot police to physically subdue and arrest student protesters calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza. By June, more than 3,200 students, faculty and community members had been arrested, many injured, some shot with rubber bullets. Many still face charges. Administrators justified this use of force by arguing that these campus protests were anti-Semitic and made Jewish students, faculty and staff feel uncomfortable and unsafe. But a disproportionate number of the protesters were Jews. This article sets some historical context for a weaponization of anti-Semitism that some have called a ‘new McCarthyism.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the dominant narrative of the historical formation of democracy in Denmark, which emphasises a smooth and gradual linear transition to democracy and modernity, this paper accentuates a discontinuous and contentious road towards democratisation. Based on quantitative and qualitative sources, this article identifies four major waves of popular mobilisation that paved the way for the introduction and expansion of political rights. The first wave of popular protest began in the 1830s and culminated in 1848 with the fall of absolutism and the transition to constitutional monarchy. The next protest wave from 1885 to 1887 arose from the so‐called ‘constitutional struggle’ and mobilised hundreds of thousands of ordinary Danes and contributed to the nationalisation and parliamentarisation of the political system. The third wave unfolded around the end of the Second World War, while the hitherto last wave of popular struggle erupted in 1968 with the youth rebellion. The analysis shows that ‘democracy’ was the central issue of contention in all four protest waves and supports the main thesis that periods of intense interaction between popular protest and the state have had a decisive formative influence on the genesis and further development of Danish democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global – albeit uneven – nature of the Covid-19 pandemic has heralded changes that shape and reshape ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes, mediascapes (Appadurai 1996) [Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and linguascapes (Pennycook 2003) [“Global Englishes, Rip Slyme and Performativity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 513–533]. It is unsurprising then that the papers in this Special Issue show how contradictions have become commonsensical in the post-Covid landscape. Agency runs as an overarching theme across the papers in diverse forms: the reassigning of primary responsibility for health to individuals by authorities (Huang); the undertaking of active surveillance of the self and others (Leppänen); increasing agency through digital technology and multimodal repertoires (Ou and Maelström); and activism in the form of positive digital citizenship (Jiang) or online and offline political activism and protest (Silva and Lopes). Intertwined with this theme of agency, a number of areas emerge: the issue of personalisation or individualisation in digital communication; the increasing multi-modality and in particular the creative move from remediation to resemiotisation, benign and malignant; the role of surveillance, in terms of the policing of order, maintenance of behaviour and control of the self and others, and of explicit groups by official authorities; and the hierarchies and inequalities in terms of the uneven experience of the pandemic and its ongoing effects and activist responses to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractInmates’ food refusal is a large-scale phenomenon raising clinical, ethical, and professional responsibility issues. Obtaining a clinical balance of the right to refuse food with the right to protect the inmate’s health can be a challenging process. Several reasons may support inmates’ choice of refusing food, including political or protest reasons, as well as psychiatric disorders. The World Medical Association defines a hunger striker as a mentally competent person who has indicated his/her decision to go on a hunger strike by refusing to take any food and/or liquid for a significant amount of time. Force-feeding of mentally capable people is not allowed by a legal standpoint, nor medical treatment can be carried out without patients’ explicit consent. According to these premises, both the clinical assessment of possible concurrent psychiatric disorders as well as the assessment of inmates’ mental capacity to make decisions about refusing food might help in understanding this behavioural issue. We will also discuss the ethical and legal implications related to the right of refusing food according to the current Italian legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objective Methods Results Conclusion The data modernization initiative (DMI) is a multi‐year, multi‐billion‐dollar endeavor toward a robust public health information infrastructure. The various DMI projects (interoperability, analytics, workforce, governance) present an opportunity for a learning health system (LHS) framework in public health. The objective is to share an academic‐practice partnership model between the University of Minnesota (UMN) and the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) in advancing public health informatics (PHI) and its relationship to an LHS model.The UMN‐MDH partnership was conceptualized in 2018 as a 1‐year pilot with annual renewals through a time/cost‐sharing faculty position with PHI expertise. The partnership focus was decided based on MDH's needs and mutual interests, with the core collaborating faculty (SR) being an embedded researcher at MDH. Responsibilities included supporting electronic case reporting (eCR), interoperability projects, and assisting MDH staff with PHI presentations/publications. The partnership has expanded to PHI workforce development through a national grant and now includes an interest in applying the LHS framework to MDH‐DMI work.The MDH‐DMI team has embarked upon 13 projects for assessment through an LHS approach: systems interoperability projects between MDH and healthcare/local public health (n = 6); systems modernization for MDH programs (n = 5); informatics workforce development (n = 1); and program governance (n = 1). Each project has been evaluated and/or has current/future assessment plans to synthesize learnings and create a feedback loop for iterative improvement. The partnership has been mutually beneficial as it met agreed upon metrics across both institutions. The program's productivity is showcased with shared authorship in 10 peer‐reviewed proceedings/publications, 22 presentations and 16 posters across local/national conferences.The current case report of the UMN‐MDH partnership is a relatively recent exemplar to support tangible LHS demonstration in public health. Building LHS momentum at MDH and other public health entities will require LHS champion(s) and continued academic collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhile it is obvious that the space for protests in Hong Kong has declined significantly, it is far less apparent how the political culture has been transformed. Based on an analytical framework using the Lefebvrian concept of space, the paper draws on the July 1st protest march to trace how the political space of the population has been reduced. Relatively quickly, Hong Kong has transformed from a vibrant civil society to one marked by fear and self-censorship similar to other authoritarian regimes. Following an expansion of protest space during the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement, the Chinese government has enacted a National Security Law to eliminate most political activism. The study shows the success of the government’s repression although the long-term impact is not yet clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020-23 wave of protests in Thailand forever changed the country's political landscape. While stemming from and inspired by the 2011 protests, its ability to undermine the hegemony of form and the eternal state of Thailand remains unmatched. People no longer act as if everything is normal but have started to acknowledge the underlying problems. Through parodies and cynicism, they expose the fragility of the eternal state. The Internet has made it easier for subversive acts to spread. To evade censorship, subversive acts use metaphorical and paradoxical parody as a tool to disguise messages as innocuous. Thailand has experienced turbulence in the past decades with the interregnum crisis. People who believed in the regime have become ta sawang (disillusioned)--but with the draconian lèsemajesté law, they have no way to voice their dissent except through cynicism and parody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social trust is believed to be beneficial to societal mobilization and the participation in protests. At the same time, state performance, notably of state power structures during instances of social and political protest and change, has an impact on the public perception of and trust in these institutions as well as the assessment of their legitimacy. The police are the most visible manifestation of state authority, which has become particularly apparent during post-electoral protests in Belarus in 2020, when their performance directly influenced and determined further societal mobilization. Based on a mixed-methods design, drawing on interview and survey data, this contribution seeks to shed light on the role of trust in societal mobilization during instances of protest and change in Belarus between 2020 and 2021. One of the main findings is that repression by the regime and its police forces affected both institutional trust and the level of protest mobilization. Protest participation in turn correlates with an increase in social trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper interrogates the seemingly absurd conspiracies associated with the “15-minute City,” an idea taking hold of urban communities across the globe to bring more amenities, including parks, recreation facilities, and libraries, within a 15-minute walk of where people live. Introduced as a mundane planning initiative to improve livability, eliminate or shorten car trips, and improve health outcomes, the 15-minute City has encountered surprising, yet resolute attack by conspiracy theorists who view it as a concealed leftist tactic to imprison local inhabitants within restrictive neighbourhood boundaries. In exploring the origins of the 15-minute City idea and the emergence of conspiracy theories that surround it, this paper unpacks the complex interplay of social, political, and psychological factors that drive current conspiratorial thinking about ostensibly benign policies and practices. In so doing, it considers the responsibility of leisure scholars in an age of misinformation, alternative facts, and post truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to research on everyday resistance as a means of citizens' political subjectification in autocracies and advances the literature on the manipulation of news. Through analysis of state-controlled media and individual interviews, it traces how older people in Belarus engage in anti-authoritarian protests by relying on pre-existing patterns of interactions with the state. My analysis demonstrates that to promote its legitimacy, the paternalist regime cultivates dependence in older citizens and represents itself as the primary solution to problems associated with old-age vulnerability. In response to their systemic marginalisation in the job market, urban development and public health policies, older people claim their equal rights by resisting old-age vulnerability or performing it to challenge the system. The article argues that by practising low-key acts of insubordination, older Belarusians acquire the collective self-awareness and cultural competence that allowed them to engage in the 2020 protests as a distinct political subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Infants face the constant challenge of selecting information for encoding and storage from a continuous incoming stream of data. Sleep might help in this process by selectively consolidating new memory traces that are likely to be of future relevance. Using a deferred imitation paradigm and an experimental design, we asked whether 15‐ and 24‐month‐old infants (N = 105) who slept soon after encoding a televised demonstration of target actions would show higher imitation scores (retention) after a 24‐h delay than same‐aged infants who stayed awake for ≥4 h after encoding. In light of infants' well‐known difficulties in learning and remembering information from screens, we tested if increasing the relevance of the televised content via standardised caregiver verbalisations might yield the highest imitation scores in the sleep condition. Regardless of sleep condition, 24‐month‐olds exhibited retention of target actions while 15‐month‐olds consistently failed to do so. For 24‐month‐olds, temporal recall was facilitated by sleep, but not by parental verbalisations. Correlational analyses revealed that more time asleep within 4 h after encoding was associated with better retention of the target actions and their temporal order in 24‐months‐olds. These results suggest that sleep facilitates memory consolidation of screen‐based content in late infancy and that this effect might not hinge on caregivers' verbal engagement during viewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Climate Strike Movement (or Fridays for Future) is one of the most prominent transnational protest movements nowadays. In this paper, I examine the reactions of politicians to this movement to answer the research question: To what extent have German Members of Parliament (MPs) been responsive to local environmentalist street protests by focusing their attention on the Climate Strike Movement and Environmental Policy? To this end, I apply dictionary-based quantitative text-analytical tools to study German MPs' political communication through 292,949 Facebook posts and 43,644 parliamentary debates between September 2017 and February 2020. Focussing on the effect of the first global climate strike in March 2019 and leveraging varying protest frequencies between the electoral districts, I show that MPs are responsive to protest events in their districts. More local street protest events in an electoral district led to more attention to the Climate Strike Movement and Environmental Policies by political representatives associated with that district. Comparing different discursive arenas, I show how politicians adjust their communication according to the arena's audience, with protests affecting the political attention to environmental policies more in parliamentary debates than on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anyone who has lived in a city knows that, separately from the administrative or electoral districts, there are districts that exist in the imagination. Areas of the city seem to have a distinctive character and ethos. The article suggests that such notional place‐forming occurs spontaneously through everyday sensations, life activities, and events and is spontaneously evaluative and comparative. In these ways, a notion of "intuitive district" differs from externally given analytical concepts commonly used in the literature to categorize urban divisions, such as neighborhood or quartier. Intuitive districts are subjective but also widely shared in urban communications. The article argues that they have an objective agency: They influence people's decisions, what they care about, how they move around the city, and interact (or do not interact) with other residents. Using the example of one post‐socialist city in Russia (Ulan‐Ude), the article explores how intuitive directs have formed and shows how their existence can have effect on highly diverse urban processes and actions, from the formation of gangland territories to house prices, from religious intensification to providing the foundation for public protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines traditional forms of rural protest in Spain, Catalonia's wine-growing regions during the late 19th century, highlighting how these protests evolved in response to social and economic changes driven by the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It focuses on the role of mutual aid societies and resistance groups, particularly the Federació de Treballadors Agrícoles and the anarchist Campo de Trabajadores conference, in shaping rural protests.

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

The year 2023 in Israel started with illiberal constitutional change efforts by the new right-wing government and concluded with a brutal attack by Hamas terrorists and the subsequent war. Both occurrences galvanized two massive surges of civil society activism. The first was a mass protest that impeded the government's undemocratic legislation. The second was a large- scale mobilization to support a variety of populations affected by the war, providing services and goods that supplanted the failed governmental crisis response. Using a Serving Elite perspective and elaborating on this concept in the Israeli context, the paper analyzes the organizations that transitioned overnight from protest to service delivery. While these are two known roles played by civil society in general, such a transition from protest to support within the same organization is unusual, if at all existent. The paper analyses nineteen (19) in-depth interviews with leaders of 10 prominent organizations active in the protest and the aid phases. It explores their participants, forms of organizing, activities, ideologies, and interconnections, particularly emphasizing the transition. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed the emergence of a new Serving Elite in the making, liberal in orientation, and developed during the crises. This perspective provides an opportunity to highlight processes deeply embedded in Israel's social, political, and cultural landscapes, changing elites and power relations, and Israel's culture of entrepreneurship. It also provides a framework for analyses of serving elites in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming to debate the the power of the counter-mobilization that emerged on Twitter during the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil, we carried out a documental study on Twitter collecting texts and images associated with the #BolsonaroGenocida hashtag, between March 13 and June 6 of 2021, a period in which intense public demonstrations took place against the Bolsonaro's government in the country. We analysed 1243 tweets and 503 images, identifying the main contents anchored and objectified by the hashtags, revealing the various dimensions that compose the social representations associated with Bolsonaro and his management during the pandemic. The tweets' contents comprehend the social and political demonstration arising from part of the Brazilian people against the actions taken by the president of Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to thousands of deaths that could have been avoided; regarding the images, the results point out an emotional anchoring of Bolsonaro's image to death. It is therefore important to demarcate the nature of Twitter as an specific platform for the mobilization of SR through the sharing of images and texts, which ends up evoking emotions that contribute to accentuating the social identity of the group that is expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how Syria’s Baathist regime has managed to maintain its domination or hegemony over much of the country’s populace under conditions of extended violence is an ongoing one. Its influence is evident in the apparently uncoerced public demonstrations of support for Bashar al-Assad that have regularly occurred over the decade since the outbreak of the conflict in 2011. In this article I focus on the ideological aspects of this loyalist support and present an analysis that emphasises masculinism as a central aspect of the regime’s strategy to consolidate and maintain political power. While other analyses have described the influence of sectarianism, regional rivalries, patronage networks and securitisation as contributing factors in authoritarian survival in Syria, the gendered dimensions of Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power have received less scrutiny. The broader study of links between militarisation, nationalism and masculinism has much to offer in expanding our understanding of the persistence of Syrian Baathist loyalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catalonia has become a rich site to investigate minorised-language identity, with the reemergence of a movement calling for independence. Our case study analyses how pro-/anti-secessionist protests are (counter)-fought in urban Linguistic Landscapes. We approach LLs as identity-markers and place-makers delivering messages of political subversion/dominance where majority/minorised-language choice and utopian/dystopian discourse become crucial for understanding their meanings during social upheaval, with renewed nationalist protests linked to an independence Referendum. We employed a content analysis based on a semiotic/semantic interpretation and thematic categorisation of the data. We show that two antithetical “Catalans”/“Spaniards” identities reemerge which mobilise either utopian projects written in Catalan or dystopian visions in Spanish, through intertextuality. The former, categorised as pro-independence “political resistance LLs,” project a hopeful impossible to extend a liberating possible. The latter, pro-unionist “threats to Catalan protesters LLs,” reinstate order, enforcing the suppression of dissent. This reveals that ethnolinguistic identities are newly reconfigured/resignified, unpacking how a social-semiotics focus on language choice and utopia/dystopia can prefigure social conflict development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Colombian feminist protests from 2020 onwards, exploring how the collective rage and trauma from systemic patriarchal violence are harnessed to foster creativity and community-building. It examines the diverse methods of protest, including physical demonstrations, online activism, and performance art, and how these efforts challenge societal norms and advocate for change.

By far the majority of people in our world live in economically precarious communities in which daily experiences of material indignity are reinforced by disrespectful treatment from public authorities. Although these communities experience the collective trauma of material indignity and social nonrecognition, they tend to engage frequently in collective activism to demand dignified lives. Sometimes the collective action is very public, e.g. street protests against the lack of sanitation. At other times the collective action is less public and under the radar, embedded in everyday livelihood activities. These forms of activism not intended as political; they emerge out of necessity. In this paper I explore a number of inter-related questions: what kind of political activation emerges from experiences of being treated less than human in material and recognition terms? What kind of psychological frame does political activation offer for the emergence of identity and subjectivity? How do people move between experiences of painful non- recognition toward political thoughts (and collective action) about being rightful citizens? What does it mean for unformulated experience to become represented through political activation as a mode of building a sense of self with one another? The paper seeks to contribute to a fruitful dialogue on activism between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "The Crisis of Authority" analyzes the relationship between authority and citizenship in political systems, highlighting the decline of obedience and the spread of popular protest as a reflection of a critical citizenship. It presents the book "The Crisis of Authority" by Natalia Velilla, which addresses the crisis of authority from an updated and original perspective, proposing the concept of "celebritas" as a new form of authority based on charismatic figures and populist leaders. The crisis of authority is analyzed from three interrelated areas: education, political institutions, and the search for an alternative form of authority. The author reflects on the weakening and erosion of democracy and advocates for education in freedom of criticism as a way to protect the democratic system. [Extracted from the article]

This article contributes to recent scholarly efforts to reassess the history of Third-Worldism in Europe during the Cold War. Focusing on left-wing activists who mobilized through and beyond the long 1960s in the Spanish city of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the article demonstrates how local communities drew meaning from and projected meaning onto the Third World to help them understand domestic conditions under the Francoist dictatorship, find common ground during the transition to democracy, and carve out a new role for Spanish democracy on European and global stages based on the collective values of non-alignment, participation, Third-World optimism and solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephanie Collins' book "Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to Morality" explores the metaphysical and moral implications of collective agency and group responsibility. Collins argues that organizations are material objects composed of both material and non-material parts, with members being the material parts. She discusses the blameworthiness of organizations from volitionist, attributivist, and aretaic perspectives, highlighting the moral significance of organizational attitudes and character. Collins also examines how organizational wrongdoing implicates members and considers the liability of members in historical or diffuse wrongdoings. Overall, the book offers valuable insights into the understanding of organizations and their ethical implications. [Extracted from the article]

Higher education consists of a wide array of education programs, some of which closely involve both domestic politics and issues that transcend national boundaries. This paper explores a controversial and highly contested higher education program that is shaped by a post-conflict affected context and transnational politics. Based on the case study of a new Vietnamese language studies program in Cambodia, the paper demonstrates that when post-conflict education and transnational politics intersect with one another in many ways, post-war higher education reconstruction becomes a platform where stakeholders such as youths and national and international governments contest and negotiate influence and change. By critically examining the relations between educational phenomena and historical, national, and geopolitical dynamics in a post-conflict environment, the paper discusses key factors of higher education reconstruction in the aftermath of social upheavals and mass atrocities. It also offers a fresh perspective on the multifaceted dynamics of a higher education program which involves public protests, state intervention, transnational disputes, and inter-state relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the role of digital media in contentious politics? On the one hand, digital media plays a central role in informing the public and organizing political movements. On the other hand, it has become a valuable tool for digital repression in authoritarian states. This study concentrates on the patterns of digital media use by pro-government actors in times of nationwide protests in autocracies. It analyzes how pro-government actors establish control over political discourse and information flow online compared to pro-opposition and neutral actors. I argue that, following the increased use of social media by opposition actors during social movements, the state will seek to establish its presence online, attempt to reach larger audiences, and endeavor to frame political issues in a beneficial light to reinforce political control. I use the cases of the 2020–21 protests in Belarus and the 2022 anti-war protests in Russia and employ text-as-data computational methods to analyze communication patterns on public Telegram channels. The results show that pro-government channels in Belarus and Russia followed the protest paradigm and framed protests as illegal, unauthorized activities that cause chaos and disorder. The pro-opposition Telegram channels in Belarus reached a larger audience than pro-state or neutral channels. In contrast, pro-government and neutral channels in Russia dominated the Telegramsphere. These contrasting patterns of Telegram channel activity and popularity suggest that the Russian pro-government online actors are more sophisticated in controlling and manipulating the communication space than Belarusian pro-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the dynamics of father-children relationships in conflict management during and after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement in Hong Kong. In-depth interviews with 17 fathers and 21 activists revealed how authoritarian approaches to fatherhood influence family conflict outcomes against the backdrop of social upheaval during and after the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. A conceptual framework of intimacy and face (mianzi or lian) enriches the discussion of fatherhood roles, father-children conflict management, and how participation in social movements affects their relationships. The construct of fatherhood is variable, changing, and relational, and it involves intimacy and face for father-son/daughter relationships to remain healthy during political conflicts. Hong Kong presents a unique case of evolving fatherhood, parent-child relationships, and family dynamics where the link between gender and social movement participation is extended beyond political-economic processes. This article contributes to the literature on the intergenerational dialogue between fathers and their activist children outside a Western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological change has brought a new dimension to the interaction between civic protest and policing in post-Soviet societies. Social media has had a revolutionary impact on protests during the last decade, mobilising citizens to resist state corruption and despotism, notably in states like Armenia, the Republic of Moldova and Belarus. Enhanced surveillance techniques and new communication channels have, at the same time, changed policing techniques and the modes of interaction between citizens and the police. This article examines the dynamics of transformed protest and policing practices, particularly of public order police, in the context of digitisation and social/political protest and change. It sheds light on the transformation of citizen-police relations and, ultimately, on the repercussions this has on the respective polities. The principal findings of the paper reveal that digital technology has been an important element in the evolution of practices of policing and police reform across the region. Yet, it is only one aspect of many in the somewhat divergent development of citizen-police relations. So far, it has produced rather negative effects instead of having been conducive to the mentality and ethos of the police. The disconnect between people and the police remains large in societies across the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on political conflict often overlooks the role of visual-based platforms like Instagram in expressing political discontent, focusing primarily on textual content from newspapers and social media. This paper examines the practicalities and challenges of conducting visual research on Instagram, particularly in the context of comparative studies. We highlight the difficulties associated with sampling representative visual content. Through a small case study, we illustrate how hashtags associated with a single country can generate multiple conflicts, using indicators developed in political protest research and contentious politics. The existence of diverse debates within and across hashtags complicates cross-country comparisons of Instagram content and conflict dynamics. To address this issue, we propose an analytical tool for cross-hashtag analysis, allowing for the assessment of degrees of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platform food delivery workers have been under much scrutiny over the last couple of years. Undocumented riders, and their recent strikes and protests in France, have not received as much attention as other issues regarding platform labour (contract work, algorithmic control, surveillance). This article follows fieldwork conducted in Paris and interviews with food couriers. Building on work by critical urban studies, migration studies and science and technology studies, this research puts forward citizen‐rentier‐ship, a tool to understand how multiple parties profit from aspects of precarious status. Interviews with undocumented couriers who worked in Paris highlight how the subletting of accounts, the complicit role of the state, the hypocrisy of employers and the interdependency with the "regularised" put undocumented couriers in hyper‐precarious situations. This article concludes that labour laws, misclassification and migration policies are at the centre of the struggles of Paris' delivery workers and that they need changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A unique feature of Pacific Journalism Review, compared with many other journalism and media research journals, has been a particular focus on photography and documentary. Contributors have been eclectic and varied, ranging from activist photojournalist John Miller (Ngapuhi), who charted the new wave of Māori assertiveness from the first Nga Tamatoa protest at Waitangi in 1971 and who offered a research portfolio on the Ngatihine Land/Forestry legal dispute in Northland Aotearoa, to Ben Bohane's 'Melanesian mythical places with unreported conflicts', to Kasun Ubayasiri's 'Manus to Meanjin' study of refugee migration, to Filipino Fernando G. Sepe's stunning but shocking portrayal of President Rodrigo Duterte's extrajudicial 'war on drugs' (in reality a 'war on poverty'), through to Todd M. Henry's Tongan 'Gangsters in Paradise' and the realm of kava in New Zealand. At least a dozen portfolios have been published by the journal and this article examines and reflects on some of the highlights. The photoessay is completed with a portfolio of protest photographs from the seven months of Israel's War on Gaza. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Over the last few years there has been growing attention to and discussion of the so-called militarization of policing. Unfortunately, much of this discussion poses the militarization of policing as a recent phenomenon. This paper examines policing in Canada within the context of an ongoing military practice. It shows that policing was founded on a military basis and continues to be carried out on a military basis as exemplified in the more recent developments that have raised alarm about militarization. It raises the need for a retheorization of policing within the context of capitalist social struggles and highlights some instructive recent theoretical developments toward that end. Properly understanding the police in Canada can help to contextualize and challenge current responses that are limited to reforms for police (de-militarization, de-escalation, improved training, non-lethal weaponry, etc.) or which even allow for the expansion of policing (community policing, drones, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Aposta is the property of Aposta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Aposta is the property of Aposta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How do political parties leverage patriotic appeals in their online campaigning within the context of autocracies and hybrid regimes? This study delves into the digital campaign strategies deployed by political parties during the most recent legislative elections in Russia (2021) and Ukraine (2019). In light of the armed conflict between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the eastern area of Ukraine, war-related themes and patriotic rhetoric emerged as pivotal concerns for politicians in both countries. The "rally around the flag" phenomenon posits that, in times of crisis, citizens often experience an intensified sense of national identity and patriotic fervor. Consequently, references to patriotism and related topics may evoke positive responses and prove instrumental for politicians during elections, serving to engage, mobilize, and attract voters. Drawing on a manual content analysis of the underlying communication strategies, we assessed whether parties' reference to patriotic gestures and symbols or their attention to related policy topics (defense, war and military conflicts, and foreign policy and international relations) yielded an increased level of user engagement. Our findings reveal that references to patriotic symbols engendered increased user engagement within the Russian context, albeit without significantly affecting the engagement of Ukrainian voters. The latter tended to exhibit greater engagement with posts addressing defense and foreign policy matters though. Interestingly, Russian parties conspicuously avoided war-related topics, while Ukrainian voters displayed a propensity to penalize such content by generating fewer reactions to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Descriptions of social movement factionalism are often based on the dichotomous conception of lawful moderates and violent radicals. In this article, we nuance this distinction by illustrating the complexity of radical flanks through an empirically grounded analysis of protest tactics, in which we ask under what conditions radical flanks are likely to use violent protest tactics. Exploring dominant explanations of political violence, the article shows the necessity of understanding the use of violent protest tactics as part of cognitive and relational processes. The use of violent tactics varies greatly across frames and protest issues, pointing to how different logics of protest are tied to different frames. Also, the use of violence is affected by the presence or absence of moderate allies; the likelihood of violence clearly decreases when radicals and moderates form coalitions when organising protests. The analysis is based on a protest event data set covering over 3,900 nonviolent and violent events by the Radical Left-Libertarian Movement in Sweden, 1997–2016. Notably, the results hold over this entire twenty-year period, suggesting that they are robust and provide a better explanation than historically contingent causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sought to delineate how English media frame Kazakhstan. We employed co-occurrence network and sentiment analysis across 130 newspaper pieces published in 2022 and 2023. The results showed that the news in the UK and Qatar often associated Kazakhstan with Russia and China, and also referred to it as a Muslim country, which until the events of January 2022 was considered a peaceful and quiet country. Among the prevailing terms, there were "Kazakhstan," "country," "Tokayev," "Russia," and "protest". Kazakhstan was represented as a country ruled by an influential leader (Tokayev), maintaining diplomatic relations with countries in Europe and Asia. Kazakhstan's image suffered due to the violent crackdown on protests during the January events and accusations of supporting Russia to circumvent sanctions, which the government denies. However, the January events awakened a wave of foreign media interest in Kazakhstan, which gradually subsided over time. The sentiment analysis unearthed that the peak of positive sentiment coincided with events such as scientific achievements, cultural successes and progressive changes, while the decline was characterized by coverage of problems within the country facing serious challenges, including worker safety issues, political suppression, economic instability and questions about the legitimacy of elections. Resultantly, a rather ambivalent portrayal emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical training has become a global phenomenon, and the Physician's Charter (PC), as a missionary document, is key to training those outside the Global North. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in the medical profession are sometimes trained in contexts foreign to their social and ontological backgrounds. This might lead to confusion and blunders, creating an impression of what might look and feel unprofessional to those unfamiliar with the local context. Understanding the cultural backgrounds of the trainees is crucial, and the reverse is also as important. It is essential for clinicians and trainees to understand the cultural backgrounds of their patients to avoid miscommunication. In this phenomenological study, we recruited participants in 2020 who were in their first to fourth year of study of medical training during the #FeesMustFall protests. We used data from this extensive study looking at students' experiences during their training amidst protest and social upheavals in a South African tertiary institution. For this paper, we examined what professionalism means to the student participants using an African Ubuntu lens. Ubuntu and the Collective Finger theory were used to investigate what professionalism means to participants. The Ubuntu philosophy was compared to the PC. In the findings, the clinical space is hierarchical, silencing and the opposite of what Ubuntu means. In comparison to the PC, respect is overarching while compassion and responsibility are the most comparable to the Charter. This study adds an African voice to the professionalism discourse while showing African elements that could be aligned to the PC to challenge the current global discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractConsultative authoritarianism is associated with regimes that provide mechanisms for citizens’ voice on public policy issues. The existing research considers the implementation of this concept through two mechanisms: civil society working in partnership with the state and public consultation channels that provide opportunities for citizens to influence government decision-making. This study examines consultative authoritarianism in Central Asia. Using a case study of Kazakhstan, a ‘softer’ authoritarian state, we investigate whether the operationalisation of this model fulfils the claims made for it. Through qualitative data gathered from key stakeholders, the study finds mixed evidence of success: there is greater political space for civil society but public consultation mechanisms have limited impact. It is unlikely that either of these changes is sufficient to address the frustrations of citizens and forestall random demonstrations and political protests, which, in turn, may lead to violent repression by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In liberal democracies, protest can serve as a trigger for necessary policy reforms, but it can also be used by a loud minority to advance political goals against the will of the majority. Focusing on such vocal protests in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic, we investigate the following question: How does the location of protest events affect the likelihood of political engagement with the protests in a multilevel system? Combining social movement literature with studies of issue attention and rhetorical responsiveness, we analyze how German members of parliaments’ (MPs) responses vary using their tweets from the onset of the pandemic to the German federal election in September 2021. Using quantitative text analysis, we measure rhetorical responsiveness to Covid‐19 protests and apply multilevel regression analyses and difference‐in‐differences. We find that more protests lead to more attention; however, MPs respond most strongly to protests within the state they represent. Furthermore, politicians’ level within the German multilevel system affects their attention to these protests, with MPs elected at lower levels of an electoral system responding more to local protest events than MPs elected at higher levels. The results highlight the importance of the location of protests in attracting political attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes theorising contemporary uprisings through an analytical lens that considers the discursiveness, spatiality and materiality of protests and protesters, and the ways in which bodies and affects are mobilised. It offers an in-depth analysis of the October 2019 uprising in Iraq, commonly known as Thawra Teshreen, exploring the infrastructural, structural and political dimensions that shaped protesters' lives and deaths. It shows that protesters put forward their own politics of life and death in the streets, mobilising as people and bodies as infrastructures, and negotiating a new social order that centers the marginalised. It situates protesters' trajectories and subjectivities in relation to the materiality and structures of the various forces of death that have shaped their experiences, and relates them to the military-oil-capitalist complex tied to postcolonial state-building and empire. The article suggests that in order to understand and theorise contemporary uprisings on a global scale, taking Iraq as a framework expands the theoretical and political imagination about global structures of power and their political, structural, and infrastructural deployment in the everyday, and in the experience of living and dying in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverse forms of protest in contemporary Iraq have not altered the country's political system and in some respects have reinforced it. This paper argues that the existing literature has not fully explained this protest weakness, due in part to a division between an agency-focused protest literature emphasising discourse, symbolic politics, and the micro-politics of protests, where less attention has been paid to the material and structural elements; and a literature focused on the political system which has typically adopted more macro and structural models. By contrast, this paper uses concepts from Deleuze and Guattari to explore empirical case studies of the encounter between protests and political power in Iraq. It finds the notion of social assemblage useful for drawing the expressive and the material, the micro and the macro, back together on the same ontological plane. Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the behaviours of rhizomatic (decentred) and arborescent (hierarchic) structures can also clarify a key source of protest weakness in Iraq as the rhizomatic tendencies of the country's political system. This refers primarily to the tendency for destabilisations of the system engendered by protests to function as a mechanism for the expansion of its political power over new social territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use Tahrir Square as a case study to examine the significance of space to Iraq's October Revolution. I draw on the work of Henri Lefebvre to argue that the revolution in Tahrir Square was a response to the degradation of space in Baghdad after 2003 and delineate how protesters used space tactically to alter the dynamics of contention in their favour. In addition, I suggest that despite the material space of the revolution coming to an end, protesters nevertheless saw what unfolded there as revolutionary because it allowed them to imagine politics anew for the first time since 2003. In this way, I contribute to work on social movements in the Middle East by highlighting the revolutionary potential of the imagination and centring protesters' understanding of it, therefore challenging academic norms about who gets to create theory. This has also allowed me to undertake a nuanced analysis of the events that unfolded in the square, as the focus on the imagination means that I do not need to claim that social relations changed beyond recognition to argue that something of lasting significance took place during Iraq's October Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe late Bay Area Hip Hop legend Shock G stated that Tupac Shakur “rhymed from this pit of his stomach,” asserting that Tupac’s greatness was in the potency and relevance of his message more than the technical skill of his lyricism. Tattooed across the stomach that Tupac rhymed from was the acronym “T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.” Tupac proclaimed that it stood for “The Hate You Gave Little Infants, Fucks Everyone,” a statement that reflected his worldview and echoed sentiments of those like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Huey P. Newton who viewed youth as the centerpiece of the struggle for Black Liberation. Though Tupac was murdered in 1996, his lyrics and interviews resurfaced in the aftermath of the police killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 and introduced a generation born after his death to his thug persona and T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. ideology as relavent, and accessible symbols of Black Rebellion. This article explores how Pac Babies, Black youth born after Tupac’s death, have adopted his Persona and Ideology to inform their entry into the Post Racial, social media era of the Black Freedom Struggle. I offer that, by providing T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. as an alternative to the politics of respectability of the Civil Rights Movement and being resurrected as mythical super hero battling police violence, Tupac influenced both the street protests and social media engagement during the protest phase of "Black Lives Matter!". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2019, massive demonstrations swept Baghdad and southern Iraqi provinces. These demonstrations differed from earlier ones, in terms of duration, number of casualties and excessive methods used to silence them. This article analyses what became known as the Tishreen Uprising, or intifada, its causes, achievements and prospects. The Uprising was a peaceful rejection of the occupation, the quota system, the sectarian and racial policies applied, corruption and, above all, foreign intervention, mainly by the United States and Iran. This article will concentrate on the development of the events and their effects on Iraqi politics and way of life. It will also try to show the Uprising's unique characteristics, such as the heavy involvement of young women, the role of the religious institution in Najaf (al-Hawza) and the fact that it mainly swept the predominantly Shi'i provinces. Finally, the article will show the successes and failures of the Uprising, its future and the prospects of it flaring up again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]