Volunteers work for lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender, and queer rights: Motivations at a Rochester social justice organization

The reasons volunteers contribute to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social justice organizations are multifaceted and need further exploration. This pilot study (N = 35) sought to understand volunteer motivations at a Rochester, New York social justice organization fighting for LGBTQ rights. Understanding motivations for volunteerism and volunteers' perceptions about the relative advantages and obstacles of current volunteer experiences at their agency were the primary goals of the study. The study found that these volunteers are motivated primarily by their personal values, mission of the organization, and desire to develop and maintain social relationships with the LGBTQ community. Implications for volunteer resource management and research are explored.     

The mediatization of leadership: grassroots digital facilitators as organic intellectuals,sociometric stars and caretakers*

ABSTRACT

Scholars of both resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory recognize leadership as integral to traditional social movements. Following global protest movements of 2011, some now characterize movements relying on social media as horizontal and leaderless. Whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the present protest cycle do not designate visible leadership. Does leadership in social media activism indeed disappear or does it take on new forms? This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, event observations and analysis of media content related to three Canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these mobilizations’ organizers as organic intellectuals, sociometric stars and caretakers. By looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific styles that characterize digitally mediatized civic leadership.     

Activating adult allies from a rural community on lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender, and queer student issues in school using photovoice

Purpose: Many students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) face hostile school environments that can negatively impact their mental health and education. This study involved a photovoice project where high school students from a gay-straight alliance in the rural southeastern United States took photographs that depicted the issues LGBTQ students were facing and then exhibited their photographs and stories to individuals from the school system and local community to promote awareness, dialogue, and action. Methods: Twenty adults who attended the photovoice exhibit responded to an online survey about their experiences with the intervention. Results: Eighty-five percent of adults reported that the intervention made them think about issues they had not previously considered, including the struggles LGBTQ youths face, gender issues, and living in a rural community. Common emotions experienced at the intervention included feeling excited, concern for the youths, and proud of the youths. Furthermore, 81% of the adults indicated that they would take action or behave differently as a result of the intervention, including supporting and affirming LGBTQ students, using gender-neutral and -inclusive language, and confronting bias in themselves and others. Conclusions: Photovoice is a promising strategy for LGBTQ students to activate adult allies in their community.     

Social media,empathy and interpersonal skills: social work students’ reflections in the digital era

ABSTRACT

This paper examines second-year social work students’ (n = 19) reflections on empathy as part of an interpersonal skills course at a regional university in Australia. Students were asked to consider their personal, online and classroom experiences, before responding to a reflective learning prompt: ‘Online communication is killing connection: (the Facebook Like symbol) does not equal empathy’. Qualitative analysis of their responses identified tensions between students’ engagement with social media and their developing understandings of empathy. Students reported an ease and confidence in the use of social media, but were also aware of the risks associated with perceived anonymity, shifting boundaries and an absence of audial and verbal cues in establishing context and quality of communication. Their reflections also suggested that the range of stimulus material used in the interpersonal skills course—including podcasts—had increased their social media awareness and their desire to improve their online interpersonal skills. The implications for professional and pedagogical objectives, as well as curriculum design are discussed.     

Coming out in camouflage: A queer theory perspective on the strength,resilience, and resistance of lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender service members and veterans

ABSTRACT

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) service members have made profound contributions to the U.S. military despite serving under anti-LGBT military policies. Little is known about their everyday acts of strength and resistance, which is vital information for developing strengths-based services. This article utilizes a queer theory framework to (a) discuss LGBT military contributions and anti-LGBT military policies, (b) explore three LGBT-specific military minority stressors, and (c) identify four strategies of strength and resistance used to manage an anti-LGBT military environment. Clinical suggestions are proposed for integrating military and LGBT identities and designing interventions that blend military and LGBT cultures.     

Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.     

Revisiting the digital divide in Canada: the impact of demographic factors on access to the internet,level of online activity,and social networking site usage

The present study relies on the 2010 Canadian Internet Use Survey to investigate differences in people's access to the internet and level of online activity. The study not only revisits the digital divide in the Canadian context, but also expands current investigations by including an analysis of how demographic factors affect social networking site (SNS) adoption. The findings demonstrate that access to the internet reflects existing inequalities in society with income, education, rural/urban, immigration status, and age all affecting adoption patterns. Furthermore, the results show that inequality in access to the internet is now being mimicked in the level of online activity of internet users. More recent immigrants to Canada have lower rates of internet access; however, recent immigrants who are online have significantly higher levels of online activity than Canadian born residents and earlier immigrants. Additionally, women perform fewer activities online than men. People's use of SNSs differs in terms of education, gender, and age. Women were significantly more likely to use SNSs than men. Interestingly, high school graduates had the lowest percentage of adoption compared to all other education categories. Current students were by far the group that utilized SNSs the most. Canadian born, recent, and early immigrants all showed similar adoption rates of SNSs. Age is a strong predictor of SNS usage, with young people relying heavily on SNSs in comparison to those aged 55+. The findings demonstrate that the digital divide not only persists, but has expanded to include inequality in the level of online activity and SNS usage.     

Reclaiming,proclaiming, and maintaining collective identity in the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico: an examination of digital frontstage and backstage activism through social media and instant messaging platforms

This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of collective identity is still able to yield relevant insights into the study of current movements, especially in connection with the use of social media platforms. Through the appropriations of social media, Mexican students were able to oppose the negative identification fabricated by the PRI party, reclaim their agency and their role as heirs of a long tradition of rebellion, generate collective identification processes, and find ‘comfort zones’ to lower the costs of activism, reinforcing their internal cohesion and solidarity. The article stresses the importance of the internal communicative dynamics that develop in the backstage of social media (Facebook chats and groups) and through instant messaging services (WhatsApp), thus rediscovering the pivotal linkage between collective identity and internal communication that characterized the first wave of research on digital social movements. The findings point out how that internal cohesion and collective identity are fundamentally shaped and reinforced in the social media backstage by practices of ‘ludic activism’, which indicates that social media represent not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous ‘communicative resistance grammar’ emerges.     

Social media teams as digital vanguards: the question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street,Indignados and UK Uncut

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.     

The Influence of Minority Stress,Gender, and Legalization of Civil Unions on Parenting Desire and Intention in Lesbian Women and Gay Men: Implications for Social Policy and Clinical Practice

Although the rate of lesbian and gay (LG) parents is increasing, lesbian and gay adults are less likely than heterosexual adults to be parents, as desire and intention to become a parent tend to be lower. This study aims at assessing 290 childless LG individuals (120 lesbian women and 170 gay men) to explore the influence of minority stress, gender differences, and legalization of civil unions in Italy on parenting desire and intention. The results indicated that the minority stressors associated with parenting dimensions included prejudice events, outness, and internalized homophobia for lesbian women, but only felt stigma among gay men. Support from family or significant others buffered the effects of minority stressors on parenting dimensions. Thus, the minority stress processes partly explain the intention and desire to become parents in LG childless individuals. Furthermore, lesbian women showed higher levels of parenting desire and intention than gay men and the levels of these parenting dimensions increased after the law on civil unions was enacted. The findings have important implications for both social policies and clinical practice.     

The theorization of social co-ordinations in differentiated societies: the theory of generalized symbolic media in Parsons,Luhmann and Habermas

The problem of the differentiation of societies is at the core of the sociological imagination about the rise of modernity. In postwar sociology, T. Parsons developed the theory of generalized symbolic media in the mid-1960s to tackle, theoretically and historically, the issue of differentiation. According to him, the interchange media are defined as resources oriented to exchange processes between the subsystems of the social system. Starting with money, Parsons argues that the remaining media (power, influence, and value-commitments) have a set of characteristics defined as common properties for all media. After this first formulation, contemporary theorists such as Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas have developed and modified the Parsonian theory: Luhmann rejects the idea of interchange and proposes the use of communication; Habermas distinguishes between steering and communication media. In all three cases, the focus of the theory is on the characterization of the strongest dynamics of social co-ordination present in differentiated societies. A major result of these developments is the inclusion of new dimensions on which to conceive the properties of media, not only those of money but also language. Beyond differences, then, it is proposed that there is only one theory of generalized symbolic media which can be understood as a progressive research programme, in Lakatos' terms. Finally, the hand-in-hand evolution between the theory of media and Habermas' and Luhmann's re-conceptualizations on societal differentiation in contemporary societies will also be revealed.     

Young people's views of the outcomes of non-formal education in youth organisations: its effects on human,social and psychological capital,employability and employment

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of youth organisations in enhancing the employability of young people through the development of different forms of capital: human, social and psychological. Instead of asking questions about who access extra-curricular activities that may provide young people with positional advantages in the labour market and the class biases that arise in access, the article explores whether the benefits obtained from participation vary by socio-economic background. We make use of the Youth organisations and employability (YOE) database, which contains data from over 1000 young people in more than 40 European countries on the effects of involvement in youth organisations on different forms of capital: human, social and psychological. We find positive effects of involvement on all three forms of capital. The analysis suggests that the characteristics of the involvement in youth organisations are better predictors of its outcomes than are personal characteristics, and find no significant effects of socio-economic background on the reported benefits of participation in our sample. Policy implications are derived from these findings, calling for greater policy support to increase opportunities for the involvement of young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in youth organisations and for better informing young people of the benefits of sustained involvement with youth organisations.     

Timeliness,responsiveness and the human voice: The effects of dialogic strategies and the mediating role of perceived communication ethicality on social media relationship building

This study investigates how social media can be better managed to cultivate positive organization-public relationships. It advances an expanded and integrated conceptual model to test how the communication features of corporate pages on social networking sites may influence publics’ perception of the organization’s communication ethicality, which further predicts organization-public relationships as a compound index of trust, commitment, and satisfaction. The results, based on structural equation modeling, showed that three important communication strategies are success factors that could shape perceptions of communication ethicality: timeliness, responsiveness, and the use of human voice in a dialogic framework. In particular, publics’ perception of the organization’s communication ethicality emerged as a key mediator driving communication effects to foster positive relationships with stakeholders in an online environment.