Coming-Out Narratives Across Generations

This study is a thematic analysis of narratives about the coming-out process. Participants (N = 30) were part of a stratified random sample of a large data set generated from a research project investigating changes in the coming-out process over time. Participants were 15 women and 15 men from 5 age cohorts (ages 18 to 74) who self-identified as members of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) communities. Themes related to the struggles and rewards of going through the coming-out process are explored in these narratives. Organizing themes of those who figured it out in their heads and those who figured it out in their hearts emerged from this analysis and suggest two paths to coming out. Generational themes are also explored in this analysis. This study aims to provide contextualization to the diverse experiences of LGB people in the coming-out experience.     

White-Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists

Current understandings of emotions as relational expressions rather than individual states have made it possible to reconsider the role of emotion in the research process. This article proposes two ways that qualitative research on social movements can benefit from greater attention to the emotional dynamics of fieldwork. First, by examining the strategic use of various emotions by informants as well as by researchers, scholars are in a better position to explore how informants and researchers jointly shape knowledge and interpretation in qualitative research. Second, exploration of emotional dynamics in interviewing relationships can be used as data to deepen understanding of both the interpretative process and of the emotional content of social movements. I examine these issues in the context of a life history project with activists in contemporary U.S. racist movements.     

Navigating the technology-media-movements complex

Abstract

In this article we develop the notion of the technology-media-movements complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement for ongoing inquiry into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements. We consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development that allows better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We then delineate two recurrent debates in the literature highlighting their contributions to emerging knowledge. The first debate concerns the divide between scholars who privilege media technologies, and see them as driving forces of movement dynamics, and those who privilege media practices over affordances. The second debate broadly opposes theorists who believe in the emancipatory potential of ICTs and those who highlight the ways they are used to repress social movements and grassroots mobilization. By mapping positions in these debates to the TMMC we identify and provide direction to three broad research areas which demand further consideration: (i) questions of power and agency in social movements; (ii) the relationships between, on the one hand, social movements and technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics), and on the other, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age; and (iii) the significance of digital divides that cut across and beyond social movements, particularly in the way such divisions may overlay existing power relations in movements. In conclusion, we delineate six challenges for profitable further research on the TMMC.     

What Do Movements Mean? The Value of Participant-Observation

Participant-observation can teach us much about the everyday meanings of doing social activism. I conceptualize these implicit meanings in relation to work in the sociology of culture, and social movement studies, and give examples from activists' everyday interaction. A participant-observer's forays into implicit meanings illuminate three dimensions of activists' experiences: the ways activists practice democratic citizenship in their groups, the ways they build group ties, and the ways they define the meaning of activism itself. By probing these implicit meanings, we can address questions that concern many social movement scholars. We increase our understanding of how movements grow, accomodate conflict, and build alliances, and we can specify which insights are useful in theories of contemporary or new social movements.     

Network structures in cross-movement talk: Democracy Now!, 2003-2013

ABSTRACT

As organizers often remind us, we need to work across movements if we are to make substantive social change. Such talk is central to how we understand what social movements are and how we can work together. But how is that talk structured, and how might we theorize structural change over time as movements emerge and subside? This paper outlines several key considerations in the social construction of cross-movement relations between 2003 and 2013 on a daily independent broadcast news magazine program in the United States. Drawing on relational sociology and network studies, I offer a framework for understanding the changing structure of cross-movement talk as an interplay of a) the narrative clustering of movement labels, and b) the bridging of cross-cluster narrative divisions. Using positional network analysis, I first chart the movement canon – those movement labels that were used year after year for structuring the cross-movement field – and trace how key labels were used as bridging leaders during two periods of mass-mobilization. I then compare the narrative environment over time as it moved between more segmented and pluralistic structural characteristics, culminated in periods of narrative convergence in 2008 and 2011 around the Obama presidential election and the Occupy movement. By examining the overall structure of cross-movement talk in broadcast news programming, I illustrate how movement labels themselves are used by hosts and guests to facilitate the social construction of emergent movement clusters, and point to strategies for future application and analysis in cross-movement organizing.     

Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements

This paper examines the relationship between social class and social mobilization through reviewing the case of new social movements. The middle-class membership of new social movements is well documented but poorly explained by current New Class, New Social Movement, and Cultural Shift theories. These theories fail to recognize the interdependence between interests, values, and expressed ideas. Class culture provides an alternative framework for interpreting the complex relationships between class interests and consciousness in these movements. Through a comparison of working- and middle-class cultures, it is proposed that social class orders consciousness and shapes the interpretation of interests. Class cultures produce distinct class forms of political and organizational behavior while not defining any particular content of movement issues or politics. In particular, the middle-class membership of new social movements is explained by the cultural form of these movements which is distinctly middle class.     

Group Process in a Women's Career Intervention

This study explored women's experiences of group process in a career planning intervention, and the relationship of those experiences to vocational maturity. We used goal instability as the dependent variable to describe the psychological states and needs of career-undecided women (n = 99), and we used Yalom's model of group process to identify group process factors and their influence on levels of goal instability at posttest and follow-up interviews 2 months later. Results indicated that women clients, similar to other counseling clients, highly valued both cognitive and affective components of group process in career counseling groups.     

Youth Culture Religious Movements: Evaluating the Integrative Hypothesis*

This paper assesses the “integrative hypothesis” as an aid to understanding the current emergence of new religious movements appealing mainly to young persons. Four ways in which these movements reintegrate young persons into the social system are identified: adjustive socialization, combination, compensation, and redirection. The limitations of each of these as an explanation for the integrative consequences of youth culture religious movements are discussed. A distinction is made between adaptive movements which actually appear to reassimilate social “dropouts” into conventional instrumental routines, and marginal movements which appear to take converts out of conventional roles and routines, but which also perform latent tension management functions for the social system. The correlated properties of adaptive and marginal movements and the tendency for marginal movements to evolve into adaptive movements are discussed. Finally, the problem of “reductionism” in analyzing religious movements in terms of their latent integrative “functions” is discussed.     

Exploring Parents' Experiences and Reactions to Adolescents' Hyperactivity,Impulsivity, and Attention Problems

Adolescents' hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) have been shown to make parents feel powerless. In this study, the authors examined whether these feelings were dependent on parents' experiences with their older children. Two models that offer different predictions of how parents make use of their earlier experiences when raising their later‐born children were explored: the learning‐from‐experience model and the spillover model. The authors used reports from 372 parents with 1 child (M_age = 11.92) and 198 parents with 2 children (M_age = 11.89 and 14.35) from a small town in a European country. The results did not support a learning‐from‐experience process. Instead, consistent with a spillover process, parents felt particularly powerless about their younger children with HIA if they also felt powerless about their older children. This study suggests that parents' experiences of raising their older children are important for their reactions to HIA in their younger children     

Free Viewing Gaze Behavior in Infants and Adults

The current study investigated age differences in free viewing gaze behavior. Adults and 6‐, 9‐, 12‐, and 24‐month‐old infants watched a 60‐sec Sesame Street video clip while their eye movements were recorded. Adults displayed high intersubject consistency in eye movements; they tended to fixate the same places at the same. Infants showed weaker consistency between observers and intersubject consistency increased with age. Across age groups, the influence of both bottom‐up features (fixating visually salient areas) and top‐down features (looking at faces) increased. Moreover, individual differences in fixating bottom‐up and top‐down features predicted whether infants’ eye movements were consistent with those of adults, even when controlling for age. However, this relation was moderated by the number of faces available in the scene, suggesting that the development of adult‐like viewing involves learning when to prioritize looking at bottom‐up and top‐down features.     

Relationship Churning,Physical Violence,and Verbal Abuse in Young Adult Relationships

Young adults' romantic relationships are often unstable, commonly including breakup –reconcile patterns. From the developmental perspective of emerging adulthood exploration, such relationship “churning” is expected; however, minor conflicts are more common in churning relationships. Using data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (N = 792), the authors tested whether relationship churning is associated with more serious conflict, such as physical violence and verbal abuse. Couples who were stably broken up (breakup only—no reconciliation) were similar to those who were stably together in their conflict experiences. In contrast, churners (i.e., those involved in on/off relationships) were twice as likely as those who were stably together or stably broken up to report physical violence and half again as likely to report the presence of verbal abuse in their relationships; this association between churning and conflict held net of a host of demographic, personal, and relationship characteristics. These findings have implications for our better understanding of unhealthy relationship behaviors.     

A New Course Model for Content on Women's Issues in Social Work Education

This paper describes both the process of developing a new course on women and the content of such a course. Four issues that arose in introducing the course are critically examined: separation versus integration of course content; sexism versus racism; intellectual versus experiential learning; and women only versus coeducational enrollment. Throughout the paper, comparisons are made between basic tenets of social work practice and the women's movement. The paper concludes by speculating on the relationship between social work education and social movements in general.     

Muslims of northern Mozambique and the liberation movements

Despite the fact that the liberation war occurred in northern Mozambique, where a considerable number of Muslims lived, their contribution to the independence struggle has been little studied. This paper focusses on their participation in two nationalist liberation movements, Mozambican African National Union (MANU) and Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), and demonstrates that the prevailing idea in scholarship about Muslims’ aloofness from the liberation struggle is unjustified. It argues that Muslim support and participation in the liberation movements stemmed primarily from grassroots African nationalism. Like most Africans, Muslims wished to end colonialism and recover their land from the Portuguese. African Muslims of northern Mozambique were well suited to support these movements, because Islam and chieftainship were linked to each other. Chiefs were believed to be the ‘owners’ and ‘stewards’ of the land, and a majority of Muslim leaders, whether traditional chiefs (régulos, in Portuguese) or Sufi leaders (tariqa khulafa’, in Arabic), were from the chiefly clans. Most importantly, Muslims of northern Mozambique had close historical and cultural ties to Tanganyika and Zanzibar, especially through Islamic and kinship networks. The involvement of Muslims in the liberation movements of those regions, in particular in Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), inspired and encouraged the Muslims of northern Mozambique to support MANU and FRELIMO, especially since these two movements were launched in Tanganyika and Zanzibar with TANU backing and the participation of Muslim immigrants from northern Mozambique.     

Meaning and attachment in mothers and toddlers

This research explored if a mother's view of her attachment experience with her own mother was associated with sensitivity to her toddler's attachment related signals. Thirty mother-child dyads were videotaped and maternal sensitivity to toddler signals was coded. Mothers were interviwed and completed questionnaires regarding their experiences with their own mothers. Based on the subjects' responses to the questionnaires and the content and organization of their interview narrations, subjects were divided into two groups based on the security of their internal working model of attachment with their own mothers. Mothers with a secure working model of attachment were significantly more sensitive to toddler signals than those mothers with an insecure working model of attachment (p=.028) and differed in their style of narrating their lifespan attachment experiences.This study was completed as partial requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Institute for Clinical Social Work, Chicago, Illinois.     

Isomorphism,Institutional Parochialism,and the Study of Social Movements

This study investigates whether the field of social movements is occupied by parochial concerns. Using a content analysis of two prominent journals that study social movements – Mobilization: An International Journal and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social and Political Protest – it was found that the field is dominated by the study of Western movements, but is also relatively ‘worldly’ when compared to other academic sub-disciplines. Much work on the ‘global south’ is conducted by scholars who maintain personal associations and connections to regions of the world outside of the West. In addition, it was found that social movement scholars focus predominantly on the study of liberal movements as compared to conservative movements. The types of movements most commonly studied are also examined.     

Think rich,feel hurt: the critique of capitalism and the production of affect in the making of financial subjects in South Korea

This article describes the process of financial subjectification by observing a private educational programme on financial self-management in South Korea. ‘Wealth-tech’ is a popular Korean term that refers to techniques of personal finance and money-management. Ethnographic research on a private educational programme on the subject of wealth-tech brings to light justifying mechanisms of financial investments and moral foundations for the pursuit of wealth whereby laypeople’s engagement with, and attachment to, financial markets are (re-)vitalized. In particular, this study highlights the role of critiques about capitalism as well as the production of affect in the making of financial subjects. By re-appropriating critiques of capitalism and employing therapeutic narratives, the wealth-tech pedagogy redefines financial investment as an act of resistance against the ills of capitalism and foreign capital. Moreover, this case study shows that wealth-tech is legitimized not solely by risk calculations per se, but also by feelings of hurt. Participants tend to transform themselves into active wealth-tech practitioners by cultivating the kind of affect that I call here ‘thinking rich, feeling hurt’. Therefore, the financial subjects configured in this wealth-tech pedagogy are those who feel hurt, and in this emotive state are led to think from the perspective of the rich. Moreover, they are configured not only as self-governing individuals but also as collective beings who resist foreign capital through their own engagement with financial markets. In this process of financial subjectification, the beliefs that finance can make them rich become consolidated. By illustrating these Korean experiences, this article calls attention to critical and affective practices in the process of financial subjectification, in particular those that take shape at the encounter between market rationality and ordinary experiences, memories, and feelings whereby laypeople translate discourses and techniques of financial capitalism into their own values and judgments.     

Strategic innovation in US anti-sweatshop movement

In this paper, I analyze the ways in which the US anti-sweatshop movement – particularly United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) – has engaged in a process of strategic innovation in the face of new challenges. While scholars of social movements have studied the outcome of this process – strategy – there has been less attention to the process of how movements develop strategy – strategizing. This involves a dialectic between experience, consolidated in the form of strategic models, and ideology, that is the values, social theory, and norms of the movement. When the movement encountered new obstacles, they engaged in strategic innovation through a process of democratic deliberation where they reflected on their past experiences. During this phase, the anti-sweatshop movement drew on their ideology of worker empowerment to help them decide what goals they wanted to achieve and to make sense of how their social environment was creating obstacles for them. Their ideology served as an interpretive-analytic lens through which they reflected on and learned from their past experiences. In this paper, I focus on two periods of innovation in the anti-sweatshop movement: first, the development of the WRC as an independent monitor of apparel companies and second the development of the Designated Suppliers Program as a new means of disciplining them to respect workers’ rights.     

Temporality in social movement theory: vectors and events in the neoliberal timescape

ABSTRACT

Existing theories of social movements have a weak conception of temporality, which is generally tied to truncated protest waves or else to micro-scale sequences of interaction. Neither approach enables an understanding of continuity and change in the content and form of social movements over longer periods. This article develops a new conceptual terminology intended to bring temporal sensitivity to our understanding of the interplay between movements and their socio-political environments. Vectors highlight evolving patterns of interaction that carry ideas and action orientations into a range of social settings over a period of decades. Examining the interplay of different vectors, and accounting also for the unfolding character of historic events, enables the apprehension of an overarching timescape within which movements move. This theoretical approach is illustrated with an examination of three significant periods of transnational contention associated with the Alter-Globalization, Anti-War, and Occupy movements. Analysis of vectors that shape discourses of conflict, organizational preferences, and practices of individual autonomy explain dynamics of continuity and change across different movements, each of which is shaped by a dynamic neoliberal timescape.

Abbreviation CBDM: Consensus-based Decision Making; ICT: Information and Communication Technology; IFI: International Financial Institution; IMF: International Monetary Fund; WTO: World Trade Organisation     

Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat

Ephemeral social media, platforms that display shared content for a limited period of time, have become a prominent component of the social ecosystem. We draw on experience sampling data collected over two weeks (Study 1; N?=?154) and in-depth interview data from a subsample of participants (Study 2; N?=?28) to understand college students’ social and emotional experiences on Snapchat, a popular ephemeral mobile platform. Our quantitative data demonstrated that Snapchat interactions were perceived as more enjoyable – and associated with more positive mood – than other communication technologies. However, Snapchat interactions were also associated with lower social support than other channels. Our qualitative data highlighted aspects of Snapchat use that may facilitate positive affect (but not social support), including sharing mundane experiences with close ties and reduced self-presentational concerns. In addition, users compared Snapchat to face-to-face interaction and reported attending to Snapchat content more closely than archived content, which may contribute to increased emotional rewards. Overall, participants did not see the application as a platform for sharing or viewing photos; rather, Snapchat was viewed as a lightweight channel for sharing spontaneous experiences with trusted ties. Together, these studies contribute to our evolving understanding of ephemeral social media and their role in social relationships.     

How does transnationalism affect the perceptions of discrimination among Dominicans,Puerto Ricans and Cubans?

Transnationalism provides first- and second-generation immigrants with a dual frame of reference that shapes perceptions of their experiences in the United States (USA). For Caribbean Latino/as, who are likely targets of racial and ethnic discrimination, transnational ties can impact their interpretations of discriminatory incidents. This study explores the relationship between transnationalism and perceptions of discriminatory experiences of 1,577 Caribbean Latino/as Dominicans (n = 335), Cubans (n = 420), and Puerto Ricans (n = 822). These Latino/as were selected from the 2006 Latino National Survey. Suggested by our study findings, after having controlled for demographic and immigration variables, transnational Caribbean Latino/as are more likely to perceive discrimination than those not maintaining transnational ties. We conclude with a discussion of the research and practice implications.