Fields,Logics, and Social Movements: Prison Abolition and the Social Justice Field*

This essay argues that field analyses of social movements can be improved by incorporating more insights from Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of logic, symbolic capital, illusio, and doxa can enrich social movement scholarship by enabling scholars to identify new objects of study, connect organizational‐ and individual‐level effects, and shed new light on a variety of familiar features of social movements. I demonstrate this claim by delineating the contours of one such field, the “social justice field” (SJF). I argue that the SJF is a delimited, trans‐movement arena of contentious politics united by the logic of the pursuit of radical social justice. Drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as my own research on the prison abolition movement, I argue that the competitive demands of the field produce characteristic effects on organizations and individual activists within the field. I conclude by considering how a Bourdieuian approach can provide fresh insights into familiar problematics within the social movements literature.     

Habitus and social movements: how militarism affects organizational repertoires

2010–2012 were years of global protests. This wave of mobilization has been celebrated for its horizontal, leaderless, and participatory character. But this was not the case in all countries. In Israel, which saw the largest social contention in its history, the protest was marked by a dominant and centralized leadership and by cooperation with institutional actors and corporate media. Based on the study of the Israeli case, this research seeks to contribute to explanations of how movements’ organizational forms develop. Social movement scholars have shown that activists’ forms of organization are limited to a familiar repertoire of action. Building on previous scholarship, I argue that activists’ organizational repertoires are shaped by a habitus that familiarizes and routinizes certain practices. But while existing scholarship focuses on how organizational habitus develops within the field of activism, I expand the applicability of habitus and show how movement repertoires are also influenced by habit in fields unrelated and even antagonistic to activism. Based on participant observations and interviews, I show how in the Israeli case, militarism formed part of activists’ organizational habitus and contributed to the 2011 protests’ centralized and hierarchical character.     

The insufficient imagery of top-down,bottom-up in global movements analysis

Scholars have shown various ways in which new types of transnational interdependence influence conflicts and resistance. Conventional conceptualization often depicts movements as emerging from the ‘bottom-up’ efforts of distinctive, individual collectives to challenge the ‘top-down’ hegemony of bureaucratic states, multinational corporations, and some international civil society organizations. But globalization scholars, and particularly those developing a framework of world society studies, place interactions among different levels of action and orientation at the center of conflict analysis and show how mobilization and change occurs across complex, interdependent relationships. In this article, I interrogate the different and often contradictory ways that dimensions of mobilization and social change are commonly denoted in this usage. I then explore alternative global theoretical frameworks that give greater explanatory power to the dynamic global–local interface. To move beyond the constraints of binary thinking in global movements analysis, I suggest that future scholarship clearly specify significant attributes of mobilization, identify how attributes vary and co-mingle, and locate social processes among a host of global–local relationships.     

Are social movements truly social? The prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements

A growing body of research demonstrates that U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized over the past few decades. In these polarized times, what potential roles might social movements play in bridging divides between, or perhaps further dividing, people across a variety of political and social groups? In this article, we propose a research agenda for social movement studies focused on the prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements. Although scholars commonly frame their work on the consequences of social movements in terms of social movements' political, economic, cultural, and biographical outcomes, we suggest a focus on two categories of social movement outcomes (prosocial and antisocial outcomes) that cut across prior theoretical categories, and we show how an emerging body of scholarship has documented such outcomes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. We also consider how emerging scholarship has addressed the sociological question about the conditions under which social movements produce prosocial versus antisocial outcomes. As we argue, attention to prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements holds both theoretical implications for social movement research and practical implications for social movements navigating the United States' political and social divides.     

Fabrication of a desired truth: the oblivion of a Naxalite woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) explores effects of the 1967 Communist Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal India. Irrespective of the glowing reviews the author earned for her truthful representations, the novel presents the pro-Communist uprising in a particular discursive regime that establishes a particular way of remembering and forgetting. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘subjugated knowledges,’ this essay seeks to examine the epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives of the novel that have confined particular experiences and memories of the movement to the margins and rendered them unworthy of epistemic respect in the battle among power/knowledge frameworks. The novel reconstitutes a gendered history of the movement in which women’s story of engagement is spatiotemporally erased and reformulated. I argue that the genealogy of this particular oversight is rooted in the heteronormative capitalist ideology of the States that exercises discursive power over individuals to fabricate a desired truth.     

Incorporating intersectionality into research design: an example using qualitative interviews

As intersectionality gains more prominence, scholars still face difficulties of incorporating principles of intersectionality into empirical research. Key concepts of intersectionality theory include moving away from additive thinking, relationality, and social constructionism. An important challenge is how to incorporate these concepts into research design. While existing scholarship examines intersectional methodology, most of the focus has been on issues of analysis not data collection. I argue that some of the difficulties in intersectionality scholarship are not just issues of analysis but issues of data collection. In particular, I discuss how scholars can incorporate intersectionality concepts into research design by offering examples from my own research that used qualitative interviews to examine how race and gender influenced neighborhood experiences. I also present the obstacles I encountered in conveying the key concepts of intersectionality into language that is relatable to study participants.     

THE NATURE AND SOCIAL BASES OF PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL MOVEMENT IDEOLOGY: Examining Public Opinion toward Social Movements

Social movement scholars argue that movements within the same social movement family represent an ideologically coherent social force driven by an overarching master frame. Yet this claim has thus far been poorly documented. Analyzing public opinion data from a nationally representative April 2000 Gallup Poll, we find substantial evidence of a progressive social movement ideology centered around the extension of rights within the American public, as support for individual movements within this family is highly interrelated. Adherents to this progressive social movement ideology are drawn from self‐identified political Liberals and Democrats, the more highly educated, women, younger, and less religious adults. We argue that public opinion research should be seen as a valuable complement to existing case‐based social movement scholarship.     

Intersectionality and coalitions in social movement research—A survey and outlook

Over the last 30 years, intersectionality has become a prominent concept, but in social movement scholarship, its adoption has yet been limited. So far, the concept is primarily employed to analyze the mobilization of women of color and other gendered mobilizations. In this article, I argue that intersectionality matters for all social movements—both as an analytic and as a political strategy. It is important to understand that all social movements and movement organizations are shaped by multiple axes of privilege and discrimination, which influence who participates in these movements and how, what demands are pursued and which are neglected, and how the issues of the movements and movement organizations are framed. My review starts out with defining and distinguishing between structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Then, I survey a range of social movements from an intersectional perspective. This is followed by a discussion of coalitions and other strategies to achieve political intersectionality. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions for intersectional analyses in social movement scholarship.     

Grow Old With Me! Future Directions of Race,Age, and Place Scholarship

This article reviews current theories of age and place to demonstrate a more inclusive perspective in sociology that considers race, age, and place. Scholars who study age have advanced our knowledge about what place means to old people or how environment operates in an oppressive way to aged bodies. Likewise, race scholars have advanced our knowledge about the ways oppression and White supremacy are rooted in place. Yet the two bodies of literature do not inform one another, and there are potentially dangerous gaps in our knowledge that contribute to oppression. The result is age scholarship about environment that lacks a critical race perspective and race scholarship on place that ignores the oppressive conditions of age. By reviewing these pieces, I argue that scholars must inform themselves of the ways in which we overlook important analyses and may potentially contribute to our own ageism.     

Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency,Heterogeneity, and Intersectionality

This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its victims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the violence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the women’s movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of constructing ‘pure victims’, and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplicity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.     

Public Scholarship and Community Engagement in Building Community Food Security: The Case of the University of Kentucky

The current call for public scholarship and community engagement by universities and disciplinary organizations has created opportunities to develop innovative ways to integrate research, instruction, and outreach. This article discusses a collaboration among scholars at the University of Kentucky and alternative agrifood movement organizations that has evolved as they pursue an alternative agrifood system in Kentucky. This collaboration made instructional programs in sociology and the honors world food issues track places in which both students and instructors can examine “problems” of the conventional agrifood system, conduct research, and develop collaborative relationships with community activists. We draw on Burawoy's discussion of public sociology and its interface with professional, critical, and policy sociologies. Supplementing our discussion with literature from social movements and science studies, we demonstrate how this integrated approach can render sociological knowledge and skills useful as critical support of alternative agrifood movements. We argue that the “experiential classroom” is an excellent site for the critical examination within the agrifood movements of oppositional culture. This, in turn, makes possible students' recognition of injustice in the existing agrifood system.     

Genocide as Contentious Politics

Despite a recent turn towards the study of political violence within the field of contentious politics, scholars have yet to focus their lens on genocide. This is puzzling, as the field of collective action and social movements was originally developed in reaction to fascism (Nazism in particular), while research on collective action and research on genocide has long shown parallel findings and shared insights. This paper reviews the history of this scholarly convergence and divergence, and suggests that recent findings of research on genocide can be improved by the consideration of concepts from social movements and collective action. It then details three theories of the micro‐mechanisms that mobilize individuals for contention – framing, diffusion, and networks – and specifies how they refine existing explanations of civilian participation in genocide. In the conclusion, I suggest that a contentious politics approach to genocide would consider it one form of collective action among others, analyzable within the existing framework of collective action and social movement theory.     

The politics of erased migrations: Expanding a relational,intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration

Sociologists of gender and Latina/o migration and Chicana feminist scholars in Chicana/o Studies have made extensive interventions in the academic project of recovering the experiences of women in migration studies across disciplines. I consider these contributions and advocate for an interdisciplinary research agenda that continues expanding relational scholarship by developing the concept of the politics of erased migrations, an analytical tool to theorize why and how the embodied experiences of Latinas are marginalized and misrepresented in academic research. Latinas experience various physical and symbolic migrations—across and within national borders, social and political contexts, identities, academic disciplines, methodologies, and social movements. Yet Latina feminist experiences, knowledge, and political movement largely remain at the margins of these borders. Through a review of prominent research on gender and migration centered on heteronormativity, reproduction, and the nation‐state, I demonstrate the possibilities of the politics of erased migration as a theoretical intervention in expanding a relational, intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration. This paper carries implications for shifting the field of Latinx gender and migration from a focus on current oppressive conditions to one that also imagines new avenues for social justice and alternative social worlds.     

Social Movements,Protest and Mainstream Media

This article provides a broad, cross‐disciplinary overview of scholarship which has explored the dynamics between social movements, protests and their coverage by mainstream media across sociology, social movement studies, political science and media and communications. Two general approaches are identified ‘representational’ and ‘relational’ research. ‘Representational’ scholarship is that which has concerned itself with how social movements are portrayed or ‘framed’ in the media, how the media production process facilitates this, and the consequences thereof. ‘Relational’ scholarship concentrates on the asymmetrical ‘relationship’ between social movements, the contestation of media representation and the media strategies of social movements. Within these two broad approaches different perspectives and areas of emphasis are highlighted along with their strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion reflects on current developments in this area of study and offers avenues for future research.     

Invisible labor,invisible bodies: how the global political economy affects reproductive freedom in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholars have critically demonstrated the links between the global political economy, social reproduction and gender-based violence. This article builds on this scholarship by investigating restrictions to reproductive freedom and their connection to the depletion of women’s bodies in the global political economy. Specifically, I use the Depletion through Social Reproduction (DSR) framework to reveal how the work of social reproduction is harnessed to service economic activity at the cost of rights to bodily integrity with the aid of religious fundamentalist ideologies that (re)inscribe discourses of female altruism such as the “self-sacrificing mother” ideal. Drawing on the case of the Philippines, I argue that the control of women’s bodies is integral to the Philippines’ economic strategy of exporting care workers in a competitive global political economy. This strategy is abetted by local Catholic religious fundamentalists who challenge reproductive rights reform at various levels of policy-making and legitimize the lack of investment to sustain social reproduction in the household, community and country as a whole. This article suggests that the neoliberal global economy is increasingly reproduced through women’s labor at the cost of their bodily integrity and reproductive freedoms.     

Gender and Migration: Integrating Feminist Theory into Migration Studies

In approximately three decades, gender and migration scholarship has moved from a few studies that included women immigrants or included gender as a dichotomous variable to a burgeoning literature that has made significant contributions to understanding numerous aspects of the migration experience. The larger field of migration studies, however, has not yet fully embraced feminist migration analysis and theory. In this article, I describe the development of gender and migration research and its theoretical underpinnings. Afterward, I highlight the key contributions that feminist migration scholars have made to our knowledge of labor migration, migrant families and social networks, transnationalism and citizenship, sex trafficking, and sexuality. Considering these important contributions, I explore the reasons why feminist migration research still lies largely outside the mainstream of the broader field and how it might achieve better integration.     

Drug markets,violence, and the need to incorporate the role of race

While race has proven to be a critical variable in the sociological understanding of multiple social outcomes, scholars have yet to fully appreciate the nature by which it shapes drug‐related violence. Empirical responses to the 1980s urban proliferation of illicit drugs generally relied on systemic explanations of drug market violence and how participants, by virtue of social positioning, are unable to use the criminal justice system to address grievances. Contrarily, the contingent causation hypothesis suggests that drug markets engender violence in settings where socioeconomic conditions are already favorable for violence. In spite of the contributions of these two themes, we argue that both represent oversimplifications of the complex ways by which race structures drug‐related violence. To truly understand drug market violence, the dominant narrative of emerging research must contextualize the proliferation of illicit drugs within the socio‐historical context of race and institutional racism. Only if and when that happens will the field move towards realistic solutions to ameliorate this social problem.     

Critical Race Theory in the US Sociology of Immigration

This article reviews the recent literature that has incorporated critical race theory to study migration. It includes a survey of the uses, approaches, and contributions of critical race theory in the field of migration. Immigration studies have historically/traditionally focused on demographic aspects of population movements, leaving virtually outside of its analysis social processes at the core of migration, like the social construction of race and citizenship. This disconnect is troubling in the current context of globalization, where specific migrant populations have become target of specific forms of violence on the basis of their racialization. Workplace raids, midnight searches, city ordinances, and changes in social services legislation, to name a few, are consistently used against specific groups to perpetuate their oppression and subordination, becoming in a sense new forms of state sponsored violence. This article begins by outlining major CRT concepts and frameworks used in legal scholarship on immigration. Next, we identify emerging themes generated by this approach by highlighting research questions and operationalization of the CRT framework. Thirdly, we highlight areas of distinction to mainstream sociology in US scholarship.     

Symposium on political communication and social movements: ships passing in the night*

ABSTRACT

In this essay I argue that we can begin an interdisciplinary conversation by acknowledging the contributions political communication can make to social movement studies (and visa versa) as well as critically assessing how each discipline can productively contribute to the other. Social movement scholarship, for instance, can contribute key definitions and specifications to core concepts such as activism to political communication research. Communication scholarship can provide movement scholars a methodological toolkit that will help them better understand (and study) audiences, particularly how audiences understand movement messages. I conclude the essay by arguing that increased interdisciplinary engagement will grow the impact of both fields on public discourse and policy processes. An unwillingness to think across disciplinary boundaries, however, threatens to transform us into the worst version of our academic selves – close minded intellectuals unwilling (or unable) to change with the times.     

How can stigma contribute to our understanding of the formation and mobilization of collective identities in health social movements?

Scholars across several theoretical traditions have become increasingly interested in understanding the underlying factors and mechanisms that contribute to the formation and mobilization of collective identities in health social movements (HSMs). In this essay, I make the case that stigma can serve as a useful theoretical and conceptual framework in understanding the processes through which collective identities emerge and mobilize around health‐related issues. I begin by introducing the concepts of HSMs, collective identity and stigma and reviewing how scholars have defined these concepts. Next, I establish theoretical, conceptual, and empirical links among stigma, collective identity, and HSMs. I conclude by further specifying how and why stigma can serve as a unifying framework for medical sociologists, social psychologists, and social movement researchers to advance scholarship on HSMs.