Digital Commons Network^™

Editorial: Black Bear Pride Means Protecting Students From Hate Speech, Liz Theriault

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

On Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019, Rep. Lawrence Lockman arrived at the University of Maine campus to give a keynote presentation at the “Crisis at the Border; A Citizen’s Guide to Resisting Racist Immigration Policies in Maine” event, organized by the UMaine College Republicans. It did not take long for many UMaine students and alumni to condemn this visit, citing evidence of violent, discriminatory and hateful statements made by Lockman in the past. The controversy stirred up by Rep. Lockman’s visit is a perfect example for how UMaine, its students and its administration need to take a moment to reassess how …

Can "Slacktivism" Work? Perceived Power Differences Moderate The Relationship Between Social Media Activism And Collective Action Intentions Through Positive Affect, Mindi D. Foster, Eden J.V. Hennessey, Benjamin T. Blankenship, Abigail Stewart

Psychology Faculty Publications

We argue that the often-used critique of social media activism as merely a ‘feel-good’ mechanism can be countered by conceptualizing social media activism as a necessary type of collective action (i.e., consensus mobilization), incorporating theory on the benefits of positive feelings for activism, and by examining how power may affect these relationships. Women from two different samples (MTurk and university) were randomly assigned to recall a high- versus low-power experience, view real-world events of sexism, and then complete questionnaires assessing endorsement of social media activism, positive affect, and collective action intentions. A dual moderated mediation analyses at the second stage …

Leymah Gbowee And The Army Of Women In White, Alexis Steele Hackenberg

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This paper describes the founding of peace activist Leymah Gbowee’s Liberia Mass Action for Peace (LMAP) movement that helped to end the Second Liberian Civil War. It provides a biographical account of the life experiences that were crucial for Gbowee to advocate for peace and found the movement. The paper also compares the LMAP movement with the more recent #MeToo movement and analyzes Gbowee’s personal critiques of #MeToo.

“Trying To March Less And Organize More”: Culture, Capital, And Structure In Civic Engagement Among College Students, Bailey Haas

Sociology Honors Projects

This study explores volunteerism and activism in tandem under the umbrella of civic engagement and questions the importance of intergenerational transmission of forms of capital and cultural models of agency in how and why college students choose to be civically engaged. This study utilized a mixed-methods design with a survey to determine base rates of engagement and semi-structured interviews to identify differences in engagement based on class culture and capital. Overall, there were not differences in rate of participation by social class, but students volunteered more regularly than they engaged in activism. The interviews illustrated how students theoretically distinguish activism …

Wgs Program Hosts 'Pop-Up' On Political Correctness, Charles Cramer

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

For the first time this semester, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies (WGS) program hosted one of their ‘Pop-up Panels.’ The panelist/audience discussions address topics of a divisive and polarizing variety in a format that is open to the student body. The hour-long event, which began at noon on Wednesday in the Memorial Union’s Bangor Room, discussed the concept of ‘political correctness’ and the connotations it often evokes.

Young People’S Expectations To Participate In Legal And Illegal Activities To Express Their Opinions: Findings From Iccs 2016, Wolfram Schulz

Civics and Citizenship Assessment

In reference to the theory of planned behaviour which links attitudes to action through intentions (Ajzen, 2001; Ajzen, & Fishbein, 2000), the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 (Schulz et al., 2018) measured students’ intentions to engage in the future and developed items measuring students’ beliefs about their likelihood of civic engagement in the future. This paper focuses on young people’s expectations to participate in legal or illegal activities (as “unconventional” forms of engagements) to express their opinions. This paper uses data from 14 European countries that participated in the recent IEA study ICCS 2016 to explore the …

Civic Knowledge And Expected Civic Engagement Among Lower-Secondary Students, Wolfram Schulz, Julian Fraillon

Civics and Citizenship Assessment

Based on survey data from the latest implementation of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016), this paper explores the associations between students’ civic knowledge, their disposition to and involvement in civic engagement within the school and community context, and their willingness to engage in future civic activities as adults. The multivariate analyses also include factors related to resources for engagement, variables reflecting the psychological disposition towards engagement, and network-related variables in order to explain variation in expected electoral and active political participation. The results show that civic knowledge is related in different ways to expectations of future …

A Is For Activist, Melody Elliott

Diverse Families Bookshelf Lesson Plans and Activities

No abstract provided.

Heather C. Lou Interview, Katie O’Reilly

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: heather c. lou, m.ed. (she/her/hers) is an angry gemini earth dragon, multiracial, asian, queer, cisgender, disabled, survivor/surviving, depressed, and anxious womxn of color artist based in st. paul, minnesota. her mixed media pieces include watercolor, acrylic, gold paint pen, oil pastel, radical love, & hope. each piece comments on the intersections of her racial, gender, ability, & sexual identities, as they continue to shift and develop in complexity each day. her art is a form of healing, transformation, and liberation, rooted in womxnism and gender equity through a racialized borderland lens. heather works in education as an administrator. …

“Come Hell And High Water”: The Role Of Archivists, Historical Myths, And Activism In Communities Facing Repeated Extreme Flooding Events, Jay-Marie Bravent, Kari A. Greenwalt, Shawn Gladden

Library Presentations

While the names Harvey, Sandy, and Katrina ring loudly in the ears of many today – can we still learn valuable lessons in the archives from Diane, Camille, and Agnes? Climate change increasingly contributes to not only more frequent and more violent tropical cyclogenesis, but repeated extreme flooding events caused by unnamed weather systems, supercells, dam failures, and surges from rising oceans. These events have opened questions of survival for communities across the United States, and recent examples show that some communities indeed face pressure to abandon their long-standing ground and forego rebuilding.

In a 2013 article titled “Come Hell …

Queer Life, Communities And Activism In Contemporary China, Wenqing Kang

History Faculty Publications

What do queer life, communities, and activism look like in contemporary China? The two books under review here provide some valuable answers to this question. Based mainly on ethnographic research conducted between 2004 and 2006, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen’s book specifically studies the lalas (queer women) in China’s capital, Beijing. Hongwei Bao’s work, which draws on his field research from 2007 to 2009, attends to the more general issues of gay men and queer politics. Although actively engaged with recent scholarship on queer ethnography and Chinese studies, Engebretsen intentionally avoids academic jargon that might alienate the interested public; the result is …

Chitown Loves Youhip Hop’S Alternative Spatializing Narratives And Activism To Trump’S Hatefulcampaign Rhetoric About Chicago, George Villanueva

School of Communication: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about violence in Chicago spatialized a narrative that branded the city as the poster child of urban disarray. His bombast lacked any contextual understanding of the issue and offered no productive pathways for collective solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that a rising collection of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rants, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through textual analysis of three tracks from three breakout artists in 2016, my goal …

Proof Positive, Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Vázquez-Valarezo Poetry Award

This poem is an exploration of the aftermath of sexual assault and the myriad factors which determine how women, especially women of colour and Asian women, cope with that aftermath. I am particularly concerned with how the testimony and literature of Asian women can prompt other Asian women to unravel their own stories by reflecting these stories back to them and giving them a medium through which to have this confrontation. With this piece I attempt to communicate that the act of confronting and sharing trauma is a continuous and absolutely vital process for survivors of sexual assault.

Activist Framing Of Abortion And Use For Policy Change In Peru, Cynthia Beavin, Deborah L. Billings, Susana Chávez

Faculty Publications

Identifying how activists frame the topic of abortion is key to unpacking their understanding of “abortion” in Peru. It is important to explore how and why certain frames are privileged in attempts to shift policy and social norms. In 2016, the authors conducted qualitative interviews with 10 activists in Lima, Peru to develop a deep understanding of these issues. Activists worked through different approaches and lenses, including law, medicine, sociology, psychiatry, journalism, non-governmental organisational management, LGBTQ rights, and indigenous rights. Four common frames emerged through the analysis and those frames shifted based on whether activists were speaking to the general …

Activists’ Strategic Communication In An Authoritarian Setting: Integrating Social Movement Framing Into Issues Management, Hue Trong Duong, Hong Tien Vu, Nhung Nguyen

Communication Faculty Publications

Triangulating 18 in-depth interviews with activists and campaign participants, news coverage, and social media content related to the campaign “6,700 people for 6,700 trees,” this study integrates social movement framing theory and issues management framework to examine activists’ strategic communications in an authoritarian setting. Results indicate activists’ sophisticated use of framing strategies following different stages of the issue life cycle to legitimately form an issue and successfully manage the issue in order to achieve their goals. This study offers meaningful theoretical implications for examining strategic communication in social movement campaigns. It also discusses practical lessons for applying these strategies to …

Motivations For Women’S Activism In Hydraulic Fracking, Taya Godfrey

Research on Capitol Hill

Research Question: What motivates females to become anti-fracking activists?

Hydraulic fracturing is a way of obtaining natural gas and oil from deep within the earth by injecting high powered water and chemicals into shale rock to fracture it, and therefore release natural resources (Manfreda, 2015).

We have seen much activism surrounding the issue of fracking because of the environmental and health controversies associated with it. We have also noted an increasing number of female activists and hope to determine the cause. By understanding what motivates women to become anti-fracking activist we can further encourage female activism in many other spheres. …

Going For Broke: A Talk To Music Teachers, Juliet Hess, Brent C. Talbot

Sunderman Conservatory of Music Faculty Publications

In 1963—a racially-charged time in the United States—James Baldwin delivered “A Talk to Teachers,” urging educators to engage youth in difficult conversations about current events. We concur with Giroux (2011, 2019) that political forces influence our educational spaces and that classrooms should not be viewed as apolitical, but instead seen as sites for engagement, where educators and artists alike can “go for broke.” Drawing upon A Tribe Called Quest’s 2017 Grammy performance of “We the People…” as an example of the role of the arts in troubled times, we consider ways to work alongside youth in schools to respond, consider, …

Sr. Jay: Social Justice, Shayna Smith

Ask a Sister: Interview Wisdom from Catholic Women Religious

I interviewed Sr. Jay in January 2019 regarding her path to becoming a woman religious, and her experiences within her chosen order. This segment of the paper details her order’s partaking in social justice oriented activities, and how that connected to course content.

Palestinian Liberation, Jennifer Thomson

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews Miko Peled, Israeli-American activist and author. Peled contextualizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, describes discriminatory treatment of Palestinians, and discusses his own experience as a Jewish peace activist in support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Michael Drexler, professor of English at Bucknell University, discusses contemporary conversation on university campuses and interrogates the uncritical support of Zionism.

Activism, Advertising, And Far-Right Media: The Case Of Sleeping Giants, Joshua A. Braun, John D. Coakley, Emily West

Journalism Faculty Publication Series

This study examines the international activist movement known as Sleeping Giants, a social-media “campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable” (Sleeping Giants, n.d.). The campaign originated in the US with an anonymous Twitter account that enlisted followers in encouraging brands to pull their online advertising from Breitbart News. The campaign achieved dramatic success and rapidly spread to regions outside the US, with other anonymously run and loosely allied chapters emerging in 15 different nations (as well as a regional chapter for the EU). Many of these were initially created to take on Breitbart advertisers in their home countries, …

#Activism: Understanding How Student Leaders Utilize Social Media For Social Or Political Change, Genia Bettencourt

Published Work

No abstract provided.

Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, And Publics, Danny Rodriguez

Language, Literature & Writing Educator Scholarship

This edited collection of fifteen essays grapples with the potential value and ramifications of unruliness as a rhetorical method for efficient activism. Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarrett propose “that ‘unruly’ might be one word that, while hardly totalizing or encompassing all political striving, marks how speech, action, and bodies coalesce in time and space, enacting the works of politics in the ways .. . rhetorical critics have imagined” (13). Asserting that the potential reception of unruliness hinges primarily on the various definitions of democracy, they suggest that protests, uncivility, and unruliness are not necessarily antithetical to democracy but rather …

Uncompromising Hunger For Justice: Resistance, Sacrifice, And Latcrit Theory, Brenda Williams, Edwin Lindo, Marc-Tizoc González

Articles

In this Article, three law professors report on and theorize a nonviolent direct-action campaign of the kind discussed by Dr. King in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Using the basic steps of the nonviolent campaign as an organizing framework, they analyze and report on the 18-day hunger strike by the Frisco 5 (a.k.a., Frisco5). This direct action protested the extrajudicial killings of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, Alex Nieto, Luis Góngora-Pat, and Mario Woods by San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) officers and advocated for institutional change to reduce the risk of homicides against persons with similarly racialized minority-group identities. Two weeks …

Womxn Of Color In Print Subculture: 1970-2018, Lenora Yee

Summer Research

My research is rooted in the archival analysis of primary alternative print mediums produced by womxn of color collectives. Through the exploration of numerous databases and archives, I analyzed and explored the different ways in which the written word was, and continues to be, utilized by womxn of color as a site for activism. Focusing on the work of five different womxn of color collectives spanning from 1970-2018, I evaluated works by the collectives Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (ALOEC), Las Buenas Amigas (LBA), The Groit Press (African Ancestral Lesbians), the book #NotYourPrincess Voices of Native American Women and …

Environmental Justice And The Hesitant Embrace Of Human Rights, Dayna Nadine Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

This chapter explores some of the tensions inherent in employing ‘rights strategies’ in environmental justice movements. Using the example of a judicial review application brought by Indigenous environmental justice activists in Canada demonstrates the symbolic power of using rights-based language for environmental justice, but also underscores the serious procedural, logistical and resource barriers that frustrate these groups in their attempts to deploy litigation tactics. Legal scholars need to think critically about ‘rights-talk’ and confront the hard questions about its utility for advancing environmental justice. In working with communities, we must learn to listen to what communities want before we default …

Who Was Jane Walker? Remembering Women's Activism, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Vera Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In April 2019, Time Magazine released its annual list of the ‘100 most influential people’. Alongside such leaders as US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, a surprising figure came in at number 101: Jane Walker.

Institutional Investors As Short Sellers?, Peter Molk, Frank Partnoy

UF Law Faculty Publications

Short selling has the potential to improve the efficiency and fairness of equity markets. Yet institutional investors face both private and regulatory constraints to short selling. We document these obstacles and consider the potential benefits of removing them. We advocate that institutional investors engage in more short selling as part of overall net-long equity strategies, such as a leveraged passive equity index combined with an actively managed short position of a size comparable to the amount of leverage.

'Fresh Seal Blood Looks Like Beauty And Life': #Sealfies And Subsistence In Nunavut, Edmund Searles

Faculty Journal Articles

In this paper, I analyze the various functions, meanings and affects associated with seal hunting, eating and sharing seal meat, wearing sealskin clothing and posting #sealfies. Drawing on several decades of research with hunting and gathering families in the eastern Canadian Arctic, and starting with the cultural premise that hunting seals unites the worlds of humans, animals, and spirits, I argue that the seal is a prominent metaphor for the Inuit self. By extension, I examine how Inuit use #sealfies as an extension of other subsistence practices, as a way of making identity (personal and collective), and as a way …

Judicial Activism In Trial Courts, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

All On Board? Board Diversity Trends Reflect Signs Of Promise And Concern, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that while there is considerable reason to be optimistic about the possibility that board diversity efforts will create meaningful change in the number of women who occupy board positions, that optimism must be tempered by certain trends suggesting that the board diversity effort will continue to confront challenges. The recently enacted California law mandating board diversity has the potential to significantly increase board diversity not only at those companies that fall within the law’s purview, but also with respect to other companies that may be motivated to increase their board diversity efforts as a result of the …