Digital Commons Network^™

Turning Movements Into Markets: How Corporations Co-Opt Cultural Values For Profit, Anthony J. Capote

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I explore how corporations engage in values-based marketing in the 21^st Century. It is hardly a new phenomenon for corporate advertising to co-opt popular cultural values and trends. With the rise of platform capitalism — under which digital platforms generate wealth by cultivating our online data and resell it to advertisers — as well as the political and social context of the Trump Administration, however, major corporations have entered a new phase in the marketing framework that aims to attract consumers based specifically on their cultural and political values. Using a mixed methods approach I explore …

Climate Protest Scarcity In East Asia: Cross-Country Analysis Using Resource Mobilization Theory, Hikaru Komatsu, Yi-Huan Hsieh

Journal of Sustainable Social Change

Climate protests have been recognized as a catalyst for social transformation. Previous studies focused on protests in Western countries where protests were abundant. Few studies paid attention to regions where protests were scarce. As a first step towards understanding the reasons for climate protest scarcity in East Asia, we used Resource Mobilization Theory and explored factors correlated with climate protest significance among different countries. In addition to confirming factors already identified in previous studies (e.g., the density of non-governmental organizations), we uncovered two novel factors: working hours and trust in strangers. By examining these correlations, we discuss potential mechanisms underlying …

Theorizing Social Movement Practices, Christopher Lomelín, Anna Peterson

The Journal of Social Encounters

This essay contributes to the systematic and expansive exploration of social movement practices by looking more closely at symbolic and instrumental practices, on the one hand, and works of mercy and structural transformation practices, on the other. The categories we have discussed, while far from perfect, provide valuable tools to understand social movement practices and thus movements in general. We argue that attention to practices can strengthen the systematic, comparative analysis of social movements both by calling attention to previously under-studied types of activities and by illuminating the relationships between different types of practices.

The Solidarity Economy: A Way Forward For Our De-Futured World, Julie Matthaei, Matthew Slaats

The Journal of Social Encounters

As society contends with the ongoing economic, environmental and political crises perpetuated by racist patriarchal ecologically-destructive capitalism, there is a need to look beyond forms of inequality to the opportunity of solidarity. While histories of mutuality and reciprocity have long been present in economies around the world, it is in the last thirty years that global movements have begun to coalesce under the framework of the solidarity economy. This framework asserts a path forward towards a just and sustainable post-capitalist future, based in cooperation and care.. We begin by exploring how the solidarity economy framework and movement have been making …

How Many Trans People Get Abortions? An Introduction To Critical Data Studies, Derek P. Siegel

Feminist Pedagogy

As abortion restrictions escalate, scholars and activists have struggled to incorporate transgender individuals into their organizing efforts. On one hand, most people recognize that not everyone who needs an abortion identifies as a woman. On the other hand, many are reluctant to abandon or complicate the rallying cry of abortion as a "woman's issue." Caught at a perceived crossroad, stakeholders wonder, "how many transgender people actually get abortions?" in the hopes that this number might guide their social movement strategies. In this assignment, students will use the concept of critical data studies to examine the politics of how we collect …

Earthbound In The Anthropocene: Spirituality, Collective Identity, And Participation In The Direct Action Climate Movement, David Alan Osborn

Dissertations and Theses

Climate change, as part of a broader ecological crisis, is becoming an ever more potent event structuring human societies and planetary ecosystems. As the climate crisis deepens, climate change is unsettling core human identities, as well as the ontologies that define and situate concepts of "human" and "nature." And as social movements act to challenge and mitigate the catastrophes arising in the Anthropocene era, the question of how to sustain participation is critical. This dissertation explores these dynamics through a study of spirituality, collective identity, participation, and ontology in a subset of the climate movement. The research questions were: (1a) …

The Relationship Between Social Mobilization, Crime, And Crime Control: A Longitudinal Analysis Of 900 Cities In The U.S. Between 1964-1995, Erin R. Coleman

Sociology ETDs

This dissertation explores the longitudinal relationships between social mobilization, crime, and crime control. The dataset used to explore these relationships combine Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data on crimes known to the police and crime clearances by arrest with decennial census data and data on reported social mobilization events reported in the New York Times between 1964-1995. The data include information from all these sources for over 900 cities in the U.S. Analyses model violent and property crime counts, and well as clearance by arrest rates in the month after the social mobilization events. Results show that social mobilization is often …

Making The Revolution: The Young Lords And The Creation Of A New Puerto Rican Identity, Jaylynn M. Rodriguez

Sociology Honors Projects

In this paper, I provide a critique of the Young Lords by dissecting how the Young Lords shifted Puerto Rican identity from an assimilationist perspective to a politicized and decolonial one. Through understanding Puerto Rico (and consequently, Puerto Ricans) as an extension of what Anibal Quijano calls the 'coloniality of power’, I argue that the Young Lord’s develop a dichotomy between good vs. bad Puerto Ricans, where good Puerto Ricans are affirmed and legitimized as genuine Puerto Ricans, while bad Puerto Ricans are discredited and excluded from the movement. I identify four archetypes to show how the Young Lords divided …

Working Across Organizational Lines: Grassroots And Grasstops Tensions And Possibilities, Corrie Grosse

The Journal of Social Encounters

The climate justice movement is increasingly stressing the importance of building broad-based coalitions for addressing climate change. Two important elements in these coalitions are grassroots and grasstops organizations. The former bring creativity and flexibility to coalitions whereas the latter bring resources, staff, and specialized expertise. Drawing on 106 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Idaho and California, this chapter from the book Working Across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction (University of California Press, 2022) analyzes how grassroots and grasstops organizations work to build effective coalitions. Contributing to emergent theory on social movement coalitions, I argue that organizational form, particularly nonprofit’s …

To Change Everything, We Need Everyone: Belonging, Equity, And Diversity In The U.S. Climate Movement, Clara Changxin Fang

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Climate change affects everyone but lack of racial diversity in the climate movement makes it challenging for it to be truly inclusive, champion solutions that are equitable, and affect transformative change. This dissertation describes a two-part study of diversity in the climate movement using a survey of 1,003 climate activists and interviews with 17 people of color who work or volunteer in the U.S. climate movement. The study analyzes differences between Whites and people of color in terms of their (a) demographics, (b) engagement in climate action, (c) experience of climate impacts, (d) worries, (e) challenges and barriers to participation, …

Class, Sectoral, Or Self-Interest? The Collective Action Of Large Manufacturing Firms In Response To Protest, Tarun Banerjee

Class, Race and Corporate Power

When social movements protest large corporations, are they taking on just the targeted firm or is their target part of an organized sector or the larger corporate class? Put differently, are large corporations purely atomistic entities or are they collective actors, organized at the level of their sector or the capitalist class? Extant research finds class-wide networks often unify the political behavior of connected firms, including in their responses to protests. Yet, other studies find the declining significance of these networks, suggesting the corporate class is now fractured. Given the mixed findings, a key aspect of the debate has remained …

How Spirituality Intensifies Sustainability: A Case Study Of Ananda Valley In Northern Portugal, Mia Handler

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The religious affiliations of citizens in the West are currently shifting away from the fundamentalist, traditional structures of the past towards more alternative spiritualities. Furthermore, as a result of the climate crisis, ecovillages are becoming increasingly popular. Ecovillages are intentional, “sustainable” communities that seek to reduce consumption, live in harmony with nature, and create strong social bonds. They are characterized by varying levels of spiritual involvement (Greenberg, 2014, p. 274). As such, the objective of this paper is to study the relationship between spirituality and environmentally-friendly practices and attitudes, using the ecovillage Ananda Valley – an Ananda Marga Master Unit …

The State Of The Unions 2022: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

New York City leads the recent uptick in private-sector union organizing at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. A new report released by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, State of the Unions 2022: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, analyzes new union membership and union election wins across the nation’s major cities. The report also details the geographic, demographic, and occupational makeup of union membership in New York City, New York State, and the nation.

On Power’S Doorstep: Gays, Jews, And Liminal Complicity In Reproducing Masculine Domination, Andrew J. Shapiro

Publications and Research

This article explores the gender complexities of men caught between social power and powerlessness. Specifically, I consider the cases of Jewish men and gay men in the late modern West, two demographics with deep historic ties to both abjection and privilege. Such "in-between-ness” steers many, especially those who are white, cisgender, and/or otherwise privileged, toward what I term liminal complicity, a normative adaptation whereby men embrace manly ideals while disavowing femininity in themselves and others. I synthesize cultural, interactionist, and psychoanalytic literatures on stigma, boundaries, and gender practice to articulate liminal complicity as both an emotional retreat from stigmatization and …

A Content Analysis Of The Equal Rights Amendment, Ashley Smith

Sociology and Criminology Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1923, passed through both houses of Congress in 1972, but failed to be ratified by the number of states necessary to become a Constitutional amendment. There are numerous social, political, and economic factors that have contributed to the successes and failures of the ERA over the years, but little research has been done to determine how these individual instances influence one another long term. Utilizing the qualitative method of path dependency and research rooted in feminist theory, I examine the timeline of the ERA as it fits within the greater …

Longing For The Homeland: The Palestinian American Diaspora And Palestinian Advocacy In The United States, Mohamed Khaled Ghumrawi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how Palestinian Americans in the diaspora connect with Palestine, Palestinian advocacy, and the Palestinian question. It analyzes and synthesizes the interaction of the Palestinian American diaspora and Palestinian advocacy, exploring its domestic and transnational linkages. It also explores the nexus of domestic and transnational aspects relating to Palestinian identity, political life, advocacy, culture, and politics. This project utilizes two main frameworks, the first is the tripartite composite state theory, focusing specifically on the normative-social structure. The second applies a framework of intersectionality, highlighting the interconnectedness of the Palestinian diaspora and the Palestinian question with other social …

Unconventional Avenues For Public Participation: A Case Study From Rural Egypt, Hassan Hussein

The Journal of Social Encounters

When traditional avenues for learning and participation become inaccessible for less-advantaged people to learn and participate, people tend to develop other unconventional avenues to learn and participate in decisions that affect their lives. There are two distinct research approaches in the study of political participation. One approach, which had been historically predominant, focuses on individual characteristics such as education level, income and class, and the other, social network approach focuses on the influence of context and social networks in the political socialization and mobilization of men and women in democracies and authoritarian polities. This paper fits into the second approach …

Reds For Ed: Class Struggle In The Classroom, Patrick E. Korte

Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing the methodology of participant observation combined with semi-structured interviews, this ethnographic study aims to analyze the socio-historical development of the Richmond chapter of the Virginia Caucus of Rank-and-file Educators (VCORE), a left-wing opposition group inside the Virginia Education Association (VEA). This study aims to assess VCORE’s politics, origins, growth, transformation, organizational structure, and cultural practices, focusing upon the role VCORE members played in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2020-2022 campaign to reinstate collective bargaining rights of public education employees in Richmond.

Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Saifee

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.”

Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside …

The Sinhala Nationalist Imagination: Jathika Chinthanaya, Sankajaya Nanyakkara

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I approach Sinhala nationalism as a social movement from above that draws on and mobilizes economic, political, and cultural resources in articulating and carrying out the hegemonic project of the dominant social group in the country. Sinhala nationalism needs to be understood as a complex blend of ideology, class interests and political power. Sinhala nationalism is an ideology and practice of the Sinhala ruling elite which ensures their hegemonic leadership in society. The study investigates the dynamics of Sinhala nationalist imagination with a focus on the Jathika Chinthanaya (JC) or the School of National Thinking. Since its formation in the …

Platforms And Power: Transnational Guatemala, Eric Sippert

Doctoral Dissertations

Moving beyond studies of social movements and NGOs, this dissertation examines how grassroots groups in Guatemala use transnational flows of goods, ideas, and people to create new organizational forms and types of political action. This case study of an organization of returned migrants, former combatants, and indigenous youth demonstrates how marginalized groups create platforms that facilitate connections between disparate actors across nation-state and identity borders. Drawing on field research in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, I explore how these platforms emerged, threats to them, their effects, and what they can teach us about political organizing in crisis. I begin by tracing the …

Understanding The Relationship Between Resources In Institutional Characteristics And Student Mobilization In Higher Education Institutions, Michael R. Carhart

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In 2015, a national student organization called the Black Liberation Collective, composed of local student organizations at multiple institutions, initiated, led protests, and issued demands to institutions across the United States. The student organizations that mobilized occurred at institutions with more resources including higher endowments, tuition, and faculty wages. This study used cross-sectional data on 4-year public and private not-for-profit institutions from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to investigate the institutional characteristics that predict student organizations that protested. Evidence indicates that institutions that are more selective and have larger enrollment sizes with higher percentages of undergraduate Black students and …

El Pueblo Unido: How Threats Increased Latinx Turnout In Arizona’S 2020 General Election, Conner Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Latinx voter turnout in the United States has persisted to remain below White, Black, and Asian Americans. In 2020, county level data shows Latinx turnout reached historic levels in Arizona’s 2020 general election (Pew Research 2020; Census 2020). But throughout the past two decades, Latinx’s in Arizona have faced some of the harshest anti-immigrant policies in the nation. Currently, the literature on Latinx mobilization shows mixed results on the impact of political threats on Latinx turnout (Jones-Correa et al. 2018). Through in depth interviews with Latinx organizational leaders who managed mass mobilization efforts in 2020, this paper explores the role …

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Cedaw And Women's Human Rights In San Francisco, Susan Hagood Lee

Societies Without Borders

While the United States has ratified many of the international human rights treaties, some have been left languishing in the Senate including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In response to Senate failure to ratify the women's treaty, the city of San Francisco passed its own CEDAW ordinance in 1998 to implement the principles of women's human rights in its jurisdiction. Several factors contributed to the successful passage of the CEDAW ordinance, including a sturdy base of feminist institutions developed over three decades of women's activism, determined leadership with the commitment, skills, and …

Activists And Non-Activists: Differential Activist Identification In The Tea Party And Occupy Movements, Jesse Klein

The Qualitative Report

Semantically, “activist” and “activism” are convenient descriptors for participants in social movements and are commonly used by social movement scholars. This study demonstrates, however, that these labels obscure the complex decisions participants make in negotiating their involvement. Few researchers examine the importance of deconstructing traditional assumptions of activist identities and the nuances in activist negotiation and identification. Using qualitative research methods, this paper explores whether social movement participants engage in complex identity negotiations wherein they interactionally situate and critically assess their involvement. This research draws on in-depth interviews conducted with 58 social movement participants from two local-level, contemporary social movements: …

The Political Imagination: Introduction To American Government, Peter Kolozi, James E. Freeman

Open Educational Resources

The Political Imagination: Introduction to American Government provides realistic, critical analysis as well as a hopeful, engagement-oriented narrative that encourages students to understand the important role they can play in the political system and in crafting a society in which they want to live. The Political Imagination draws on social and political theory and history offering an analytical as well as normative framework to think about the substance of politics, the procedures and institutions of government, and a dynamic, socially contingent definition of political power.

Building The Fat Girl Table: Excavating Cultural Memory Of Queer Fat Activism In The ‘90s, Rose Gelfand

Scripps Senior Theses

When we recount the histories of social movements, there is a tendency to imagine either a steady, linear march towards progress or a slow descent from radical ideas into complacency. The feminist movement gets painted in waves, progressing from white to intersectional, while in the LGBTQ+ rights movement the contrast of the Stonewall Riots & ACT UP with late 2010s focus on gay marriage and the corporatization of Pride is understood as a watering down and betrayal of the movement’s origins. Cultural memory is a constant process of construction and revision, and of course the truth of movements’ trajectories are …

Feminist Participatory Action Research As A Tool For Climate Justice, Naomi J. Godden, Pam Macnish, Trimita Chakma, Kavita Naidu

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) uses Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) to strengthen grassroots women’s movements to advocate for an alternative development model – the ‘Feminist Fossil Fuel Free Future’ (5Fs) – to ensure new, gender-just, economic, political, and social relationships in a world free from climate injustices. Grassroots women of the global South face the extreme impacts of climate change resulting in reinforced and exacerbated inequalities driven by a patriarchal capitalist economy. APWLD’s Climate Justice-FPAR 2017–2019 (CJ-FPAR) supported young women researchers across Asia to lead grassroots research to expose the disproportionate impacts of climate …

The Rise Of The Democratic Socialists Of America: A Qualitative Analysis Of The Contributing Factors To Insurgent Mobilization, Grady Lowery

Doctoral Dissertations

Although there are other more conventional means through which aggrieved populations can voice their concerns, social movements have long served as important vehicles for articulating and advancing a group's interests and claims. Indeed, some of the most significant developments in the history of the modern era are bound up with social movements. As a result, social movement analysts are interested in understanding the protests, conflicts, and other forms of resistance that have challenged the prevailing social order. Scholarly interest in collective action has engendered a proliferation of empirical studies, igniting a series of theoretical debates. These debates are animated around …

Many Forms Of Black Death: Coal Extraction, Transnational Activism And The Value Of Life In Colombia, Oscar H. Pedraza Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After the murder of the president and vice president of the coal union by paramilitaries in the department of Cesár, Colombia, the union is left adrift. Its fragility is only heightened when the person who decides to take over, is killed six months later. The union has been vocal on their critique of environmental destruction produced by coal and argues that their criticism is part of the reasons why they were targeted. Not far from there, in the department of Guajira, the conglomerate in charge of Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine of South America, wants to divert a creek …