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Back To The Future: Student Time Period Analyses, Jordan Barge, Sarah Ebert, Anna Gaskin, Renay Gladish, Quinn Hamilton, Morgan Hanson, Hannah Markham, Mark Mclean, Callie Smith, Bertha Vega, Shelby Watkins, Jamie Weihe, Jillian Whitney Dec 2015

Back To The Future: Student Time Period Analyses, Jordan Barge, Sarah Ebert, Anna Gaskin, Renay Gladish, Quinn Hamilton, Morgan Hanson, Hannah Markham, Mark Mclean, Callie Smith, Bertha Vega, Shelby Watkins, Jamie Weihe, Jillian Whitney

Student Publications

This newsletter began with the Fall 2015 Honors English class. These students were challenged to initiate research over a topic they thought was interesting and show how it related to our campus, Stephen F. Austin State University. It is our hope that this cumulative research will help readers look at SFA a little differently.


Marketizing Social Change: Social Shareholder Activism And Responsible Investing, Leslie King, Elisabeth Gish Dec 2015

Marketizing Social Change: Social Shareholder Activism And Responsible Investing, Leslie King, Elisabeth Gish

Sociology: Faculty Publications

This article examines social shareholder advocacy and socially responsible investing (SRI) to better understand the marketization of activism and the intersection of business and social justice. We use archival, interview, and participant observation data to explore how social shareholder activism has increasingly come to be practiced for profit. We show how the movement's history in social justice activism of the 1960s and 1970s continues to shape the practice today, even while it is increasingly commodified, marketized, and shaped by the ideals and practices of business and finance. Shareholder activists and other SRI advocates have created a new market and a …


Wild Things: Stories, Transition And The Sacred In Ecological Social Movements, Luigi Russi Nov 2015

Wild Things: Stories, Transition And The Sacred In Ecological Social Movements, Luigi Russi

Luigi Russi

This article examines the role of stories in ecological activism. It first situates stories inside object ecologies, encompassing relationships of reliance, care and maintenance of things. It suggests that ecologies of this sort work as an extended mind where our cognition takes place and meaning is apprehended, so that what we can think of is always a function of what we have Ôat handÕ. The article then considers how these ecologies are impacted by discourses on climate change and peak oil, which stress the impossibility to keep ordering our lives through the same entanglements that have supported them so far. …


From Print To Pixel: Visual Media And The Fate Of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism, Ksenia O. Gorbenko Jul 2015

From Print To Pixel: Visual Media And The Fate Of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism, Ksenia O. Gorbenko

Ksenia O. Gorbenko

In order to be heard or seen, nonviolent social movements (NVSMs) require an audience. News images of nonviolent protests become the means through which awareness of social movements is created. Comparative historical and semiotic analysis of journalistic images demonstrates that violence is a prominent theme within news coverage of nonviolent struggles. Four types of violence within nonviolence are identified: state violence, third-party violence, self-inflicted violence and symbolic violence. The examination of news images of these four types of violence showed the different ways in which challengers and the state contest power in the public domain through the media, in both …


Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers' Movements In North Dakota And Saskatchewan, 1905-1950, Jason Mccollom May 2015

Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers' Movements In North Dakota And Saskatchewan, 1905-1950, Jason Mccollom

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research uses as a case study farmers' movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, two identical locales in terms of wheat monoculture, demographics, and agrarian ideology, and traces the differing Social, economic, and political outcomes between 1905 and 1950. The research, however, moves beyond this and also investigates the transnational integration, connections, and engagements among agrarian groups across the broader North American northern plains and across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Australia. Methodologically, this study applies Social movement theory, pioneered by sociologists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilley, which seeks to replace a …


Interference Archive: A Free Space For Social Movement Culture, Alycia Sellie, Jesse Goldstein, Molly Fair, Jennifer Hoyer Apr 2015

Interference Archive: A Free Space For Social Movement Culture, Alycia Sellie, Jesse Goldstein, Molly Fair, Jennifer Hoyer

Publications and Research

This paper discusses activist archives within the context of community archives and the practices of archiving activism. Interference Archive (IA), a volunteer-run independent archive in Brooklyn, New York, is presented as one example of an activist archive. We explain the manner in which IA functions as a transmovement and prefigurative “free space” under Francis Poletta’s typology of movement spaces. Through this explanation, we illustrate how the structures of free spaces can help us understand the way activist archives forge connections between communities and the ways that they create new networks of solidarity through the archival process.


Lawyered Up: Local Communities, Courts, And Urban Renewal, Madeline Spolin Apr 2015

Lawyered Up: Local Communities, Courts, And Urban Renewal, Madeline Spolin

Sociology Honors Projects

What is the role of the judicial system in solving issues of urban renewal? I propose that communities use courts as a redress to become part of the decision making process on urban renewal issues, because courts provide procedural issues that are easily open to challenge in federal statute. I analyze public statements made throughout the construction of the Green Line in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, a federally funded urban renewal project. In spite of built in public consultation processes, changes to transit design do not occur when concerns are raised at public consultation meetings; instead, they come from …


Solidarity Is For White Women, Aramide Odutayo Jan 2015

Solidarity Is For White Women, Aramide Odutayo

2015 Undergraduate Awards

Can a simple hashtag constitute a social movement? The answer is a resounding yes. Using the definition of a social movement proposed in the Blackwell Companion to Social Movements as a framework, this paper illustrates that #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is a perfect example of how social media and social movements have intersected to inspire profound change. Created by blogger and black feminist scholar Mikki Kendall, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen highlighted the justified resentment that many black feminists have against the white liberal feminist movement. This paper contends that Kendall’s hashtag activism satisfies the fundamental characteristics of a social movement, because it was a coordinated, collective, …


The Medicalization Of Nonhuman Animal Rights: Frame Contestation And The Exploitation Of Disability, Corey Lee Wrenn, Joanne Clark, Maddie Judge, Katherine A. Gilchrist, Delanie Woodlock, Katherine Dotson, Riva Spanos, Jonothan Wrenn Jan 2015

The Medicalization Of Nonhuman Animal Rights: Frame Contestation And The Exploitation Of Disability, Corey Lee Wrenn, Joanne Clark, Maddie Judge, Katherine A. Gilchrist, Delanie Woodlock, Katherine Dotson, Riva Spanos, Jonothan Wrenn

Animal Rights Movement Collection

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major …


The Role Of Professionalization Regarding Female Exploitation In The Nonhuman Animal Rights Movement, Corey Lee Wrenn Jan 2015

The Role Of Professionalization Regarding Female Exploitation In The Nonhuman Animal Rights Movement, Corey Lee Wrenn

Animal Rights Movement Collection

Adams (2004, The pornography of meat. London: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd), Deckha (2008, Disturbing images: PETA and the feminist ethics of animal advocacy. Ethics and the environment, 13(2), 35–76), Gaarder (2011, Women and the animal rights movement. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press), Glasser (2011, Tied oppressions: an analysis of how sexist imagery reinforces speciesist sentiment. The Brock review, 12(1), 51–68), and others have criticized People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for sexually exploiting young women in outreach and fundraising efforts. This article extends these critiques in addressing the problematic relationship between objectified volunteer female activists and …


African American Women Leaders In The Civil Rights Movement: A Narrative Inquiry, Janet Dewart Bell Jan 2015

African American Women Leaders In The Civil Rights Movement: A Narrative Inquiry, Janet Dewart Bell

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to give recognition to and lift up the voices of African American women leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. African American women were active leaders at all levels of the Civil Rights Movement, though the larger society, the civil rights establishment, and sometimes even the women themselves failed to acknowledge their significant leadership contributions. The recent and growing body of popular and nonacademic work on African American women leaders, which includes some leaders’ writings about their own experiences, often employs the terms “advocate” or “activist” rather than “leader.” In the academic literature, particularly on …