Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Pulpit And The People: Mobilizing Evangelical Identity, Tim Moser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using ten sermons from five prominent and politically active evangelical megachurch pastors taken from the 2016 presidential campaign season, this case study utilizes frame analysis to understand the political relevance of modern evangelical sermonizing. An inductive frame analysis allows the concept of a collective action frame to be observed as a process and for patterns to emerge from the source text. Within these sermons, ministers offer self-identifying evangelicals a vocabulary with which to understand and describe their own identity. In this context, the Bible is a powerful cultural symbol that represents an allegiance to traditions that are framed as the …

Black Lives Matter: The Movement’S Relevance And Comparison To The 1960s Civil Rights Movement, Stacy Jenkins-Robinson

OTS Master's Level Projects & Papers

The Black Lives Matter movement originated on social media after recent events that took place relating to the murders of unarmed Black men by civilian vigilantes or White policemen. This study examines the relevancy of the Black Lives Matter movement, while comparing it to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, specifically, concerning the differences in readily identifiable leadership. A Likert-scale survey was created to collect data from Old Dominion University students and affiliates who attended the event and students who were enrolled during the Spring 2016 semester, and distributed through the online survey platform Qualtrics.

Analysis of the survey responses showed …

Examining Forty Years Of The Social Organization Of Feminisms: Ethnography Of Two Women’S Bookstores In The Us South, Mary Catherine Whitlock

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the height of their popularity in the 1990s, there were 140 feminist bookstores in the US and Canada (Onosaka 2006). Today, in 2017, there are thirteen left. Feminist bookstores began opening in the 1970s promoting ideas about lesbian separatism, woman only spaces, and nurturing a feminist community. Although many functioned as for-profit stores, many also operated community centers and non-profit organizations. Feminist bookstores provide an excellent site for scholars view decades of social movement organizing merging theory, practice, activism, and academics. As a social movement organization, feminist bookstores as are the quintessential node of academia and activism. Of the …

Mobilization And Repression In The Occupy Movement, Eric Turner

Sociology ETDs

This dissertation project focuses on dynamics of mobilization and repression in the Occupy movement. This movement emerged in late 2011 in the United States and sought to protest the growing economic inequality and the growing influence of corporations in politics. This project focuses on Occupy chapters which emerged in 74 out of the 100 largest cities in the United States. The first empirical chapter of this project focuses on dynamics which affect differences in protest size, measured in terms of protest turnouts relative to population. This chapter first demonstrates the importance of large student populations and greater numbers of universities …

White Power In Context: The Structural Correlates Of White Power Support Events In The United States, 2012-2015, Drew Cormac Medaris

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Much of the prior research on white power groups focuses on very rare outcomes – criminal events, especially violent ones – without as much attention devoted to the more common or fundamental activities that often work to start the mobilization process for ethnocentric groups and the individuals associated with them. Broadly, the goal of the current study is to fill this gap in knowledge by integrating prominent criminological theories and themes drawn from the Social movement literature in order to explore the geographic distribution and macro-level correlates of ideologically-motivated white power movement activities. Specifically, I implement content analysis techniques of …

Terf Wars: Narrative Productions Of Gender And Essentialism In Radical-Feminist (Cyber)Spaces, Jennifer Earles

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation concerns how activists preserve particular feminisms in everyday life, particularly in this postmodern moment as advances in technology create virtual spaces, as feminism experiences generational shifts, and as notions about gender and bodies influence the discursive and political construction of contemporary activism and communities. The particular feminists at the center of this study are self-described radical feminists. While original theories allowed members to question the essentialism of bodies (i.e., sex class), this study focuses on the movement trajectory in which members critique how people assigned male at birth learn masculinity as inextricably tied to the oppression of women …

"There Is No Planet B": Frame Disputes Within The Environmental Movement Over Geoengineering, David Russell Zeller Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines frame disputes within the environmental movement over geoengineering proposals. Among other core framing tasks, social movement organizations must evaluate solutions and strategies for the social problems they seek to address. These framings are frequently disputed by those within the movement. Recent controversies regarding a set of climate intervention proposals commonly known as geoengineering offer the opportunity to document the ongoing construction of competing visions of environmental sustainability. The nascent quality of these proposals generate dissonant framings—episodes where organizations within the environmental movement exhibit disagreement about one or more core framing tasks—a situation Goffman referred to as a …

For You Will Not Abandon My Soul: Co-Optation, Deradicalization And Renormalization Of The Black Radical, Jalia Lashay Joseph

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on the exploration of state-sanctioned violence against Black radicals and radical Black organizations and the essentialism of cooptation, deradicalization and renormalization as a fundamental part of white racism. The thesis further explores the ways in which Black radicals and Black social movement organizations from the height of the Black civil rights movement (1964-1969) were de-radicalized and stripped of their intellectual and social property by the effects of power exhibited by the state. Concurrently, I also argue that these same radicals and organizations would later have many of their “radical” practices, culturally co-opted / appropriated by the white …

Filling Pews, Speaking Truth: Pro-Life Ministry In A Liberal Catholic Parish, Jonathan Neidorf

Master's Theses

Scholars of the pro-life movement in the United States have extensively documented how pro-lifers in this country feel that their cause is embattled by society (Williams and Blackburn 1996; Maxwell 2002; Munson 2008). Other research argues that conservative Catholics tend to feel that their Church is swept up in an increasing liberalization in greater society, which serves to compromise core moral tenets of the faith (Leege 1988; Weaver and Appleby 1995; Wedam 1993). No thorough research exists examining how pro-life Catholics see their Church's and their parish's liberalism as directly suppressing their pro-life work. In this ethnographic study of a …

Global Movements In The Capitalist World System: Occupy Wall Street And The World Social Forum, Loren M. Collins

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Over the past forty years, the information revolution, a neoliberal agenda and globalizing financial markets have led to a quantitative increase in accumulation, widening inequalities throughout the globe. This widening inequality has cast doubt on the legitimacy of a world system governed primarily by the invisible hand of the free market. Economic power has taken priority over political power in determining the nature of social relations and our institutions. This imbalance has opened the door for resistance movements to challenge a system that fails to represent the interests of the vast majority of the world’s population while it benefits a …