“I Really Belong Here”: Civic Capacity-Building among Returning Citizens

This article focuses on unlikely movement actors whose civic engagement has been understudied: people with criminal records (“returning citizens”). We present findings from 18 months of ethnographic research with members (leaders) of Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE), a civic group led by returning citizens. FORCE leaders received institutional support from Community Renewal Society (CRS), a larger faith and community-based organization, to lead a rights reform movement in Chicago. Findings suggest that FORCE leaders constructed notions of kinship, recognition, and power through civic capacity-building efforts—and that social belonging was core to such capacity-building efforts. While bonding social belonging occurred as FORCE leaders formed kinship with people facing similar social and economic marginality, bridging social belonging emerged as leaders felt recognized by CRS staff organizers, affiliates, and elected officials. Bonding and bridging social belonging enabled FORCE leaders, who faced constant social exclusion in society, to experience much needed kinship, recognition, and power. Future studies should continue to uncover how local capacity-building processes have life-changing relational effects on movement participants from socially and economically marginalized groups.     

The potential of online social networking data for augmenting the study of high-risk personal networks among young men who have sex with men at-risk for HIV

Capturing dynamics in high-risk personal networks is essential for preventing HIV transmission. Online social networking data offer incentive to augment traditional selfreported approaches for network enumeration. To explore what online networks reveal about dynamics among high-risk associates, we examine the relationship between egocentric confidant and sex networks and personal Facebook friendship networks of a cohort of young Black men who have sex with men. Although overlap exists between self-reported and Facebook associates, the stabilities of each were unrelated. Confidants who were also Facebook friends with a respondent were, however, more likely to be retained. Thus, Facebook networks contain stable confidants.     

The Leverage of Protest: Market,Media, and Reputational Disruption in Social Movement Success

How do social movements gain concessions from large corporations? The ability of protests to attain leverage by imposing disruption costs on their targets is widely assumed but less often tested. In this article, we assess the ability of protests to attain concessions by disrupting three broad sources of interest to firm officials: maximizing shareholder value, gaining positive media, and fostering a well-reputed image. In contrast to the body of research on the benefits to movements from shaping media discourses and damaging the reputations of their targets, we find that only market disruption provides protests with leverage. We show this through statistical analyses of an original database of protests against large corporations in the United States over five years, 2005–2009. This study advances social movement and organizational research by demonstrating the ways in which the interests of large corporations provide insurgents with means of attaining leverage over their targets. It also speaks to the broad debate over the importance of disrupting the material versus symbolic interests of movement targets. Our results suggest that when it comes to obtaining concessions from large corporations, it is material disruption and not symbolic disruption that provides movements with leverage.     

The Limits of Black Politics in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Pluralist theorists have long contended that to exercise power and influence in the American political system, blacks should come together like any other organized interest group, form coalitions with other like-minded people (white liberals), and advocate for policy reforms. Beginning during the “Black Power” era, the goal of putting black faces in high places to help address black concerns became a driving force in black politics. The deteriorating social and economic status of many in the black community, however, has not been prevented by either the political incorporation of more than 11,000 black elected officials or even the election of the nation’s first black president. This article will show how the inherent limitations of the pluralist interest-group strategy and a growing white backlash fueled by an awareness of changing demographics in the country has spawned an economic and political crisis in black America.     

Setting socially mediated engagement parameters: A topic modeling and text analytic approach to examining polarized discourses on Gillette’s campaign

Opinions on social and political issues can be easily polarized in socially mediated contexts. Using an inductive topic modeling and text analytical approach, the study analyzes more than 100,000 original tweets on polarized discussions on Gillette’s controversial campaign addressing toxic masculinity. Results suggest that influencers serve as ideological hyper-prototypes that attract significant attention equally from supporters and detractors, while hashtags and users’ reference of current events span the conversations across multiple contexts. Study results also indicate that horizontal information cascades from external ideologically centered sources that serve users’ identity and ideological signaling are a potential contributor of discourse polarization. Based on the study results, an identity- and representation-based approach to understanding socially mediated discourses is proposed, and four parameters of socially mediated engagement identified to further theorize engagement for public relations research in digital contexts.     

“Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE

Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy personae and characterological figures (Agha, 2003), by examining the presence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features in a corpus of 15,804 tweets extracted from the timelines of 10 gay British men. I argue that the stylization of AAVE signals the development of a very specific persona—the “Sassy Queen”—which relies on an essentialized imagining of Black women as “fierce” and “sassy.” Concluding, I emphasize the value of micro‐level analyses in complementing quantitative analyses of linguistic variation in social media.     

可持续生计视角下"参与式"反贫困路径探索

中国扶贫实践中出现的"贫困户生计能力提升不足"倾向源于可持续生计框架与现代贫困观念之间的冲突,而"社会参与"则为解决冲突提供了一种可能。2020年后,面对新的贫困现象和贫困结构,"参与式"反贫困理念能够通过社会参与链接可持续生计框架和现代贫困观念,在贫困治理过程中充分体现贫困者的参与性,形成主体意识和责任意识,提升个体或家庭改善生计系统的能力,使其摆脱困境、规避陷入贫困的风险,进而形成权利-义务相平衡、对城市和农村具有包容性、常态化、可持续的贫困治理策略,使全体社会成员实现不虞匮乏的生活。     

新社会运动与德国绿党的形成

绿党是西欧当代政治格局中具有鲜明个性和富有政治影响力的新型政党。德国绿党是在一系列新社会运动中崛起和发展起来的,它在德国政治舞台上刮起了一股“绿党”旋风,但由于其组织上的派别林立,政治纲领的理想化和过于激进,曾使绿党陷于被动的境地。深入思考新社会运动对德国绿党的影响将给我们有益的启示。     

趋近化视角下社交媒体关于人工智能报道的话语建构研究

基于社交媒体关于人工智能的相关报道自建语料库,通过数据搜集和清洗,运用KH Coder文本分析可视化软件,选择其中的名词短语和动词短语,生成关联词频图进行可视化解析,并从趋近化策略的空间趋近、时间趋近和价值趋近维度对自建语料库进行分析。研究结果显示,社交媒体人工智能话语建构了以空间趋近化策略为主,以时间趋近化和价值趋近化策略为辅的正向话语。同时,人工智能对人类具有潜在威胁,公众应采取相应的风险预防对策。     

民族工作时代主题与加快民族发展问题研究

民族工作必须体现时代的精神,党中央在我国社会主义建设的关键时期提出的各民族需“共同团结奋斗,共同繁荣发展”,顺应了时代的要求。少数民族的发展只有在建设中国特色社会主义的共同事业中才能逐步解决。