Time for change

ABSTRACT

This introductory article sets out the core concerns of this special issue on time and temporality in relation to social movements. It examines three areas: historical times, events, and sequences. In each area, we examine the ways that time and temporality are (often implicitly) embedded in existing social movement scholarship. We then introduce some of the problems raised by our contributors, and the ways in which they utilise greater sensitivity to time and temporality in furthering our understanding of the dynamics of the mobilisation, functions and fortunes of social movements.     

网络抗议风暴中的政府框架引导机制探讨

框架是通过对现实事件进行有意识地筛选、凸现和重组，重新定义事件、建构意义的行为和过程。它是围绕价值观和意义生产的控制权而展开的争夺，是网络舆论交锋的最高层阶。在网络议程设置失灵的态势下，抢占框架建构的制高点，成为政府引导网络抗议风暴的关键。框架在网络抗议风暴中发挥着标注、归因、引导三大功能，是驱动抗议发展的软力量。政府要根据抗议框架的不同结构和类型，形成强迫性框架、责难性框架、解释性框架、建设性框架等不同的框架组合，并将这些框架组合灵活而艺术地植入到抗议风暴发展周期中的触发点、临界点、转折点和关节点等四大关键点中，实现对网络抗议风暴全程性同步式的引导，提高网络舆情的政府治理能力。     

Building communities: The postmodern CSR practitioner as a dialectical activist-agent in India

This study examined the conceptualization of the postmodern public relations practitioner as an organizational activist who contributes to democratic processes in the context of community relations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in India. Elite, in-depth conversations with 19 senior executives at 16 companies in India well known for their CSR initiatives revealed that practitioners appeared to be both organizational activists and agents. As organizational activists, they acknowledged the existence of diverse voices in local communities, interjected these voices into management discourse, situated decision-making in local contexts, identified tensors in the relationship between the corporation and its publics, and negotiated new meanings through dissensus. Paradoxically, as organizational agents, they used these participatory, open processes of dialogic communication to shape public opinion in favour of the organization, feeding modern organizations’ proclivity for consensus. While the findings of the study support the postmodern conceptualization of the public relations practitioner as an organizational activist in the context of CSR and community relations, the agent aspect of the activist-agent dialectic problematizes and complicates this conceptualization thus enhancing understandings of the postmodern practitioner who enacts CSR within a modernist framework and navigates the intricacies of the activist-agent dialectic in their daily performance of building community relations and enabling democratic processes.     

News and Comment

This article tells the story of a classroom teacher's journey with her elementary students as they attempt to understand and define citizenship. The narrative highlights the process of using an emergent curriculum, creating a democratic classroom, and facilitating an active citizenship project led by students. The authors provide steps to help classroom teachers implement a social action curriculum, and they also include children's literature connections.     

Non-Stop Against Apartheid: Practicing Solidarity Outside the South African Embassy

From April 1986 to February 1990, the supporters of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group [City Group] maintained a Non-Stop Picket outside the South African Embassy in London calling for the release of Nelson Mandela. Whilst the Non-Stop Picket was one of the most visible expressions of British anti-apartheid activism at the time, the Picket was never endorsed by the national Anti-Apartheid Movement. Positioned on the pavement directly outside South Africa House, the Picket was strategically placed to draw attention to apartheid and bring pressure to bear on the regime's representatives and allies in the UK. The Embassy repeatedly brought pressure on the British Government to ban the protest, and for nearly two months in 1987 (6th May–2nd July), the Picket was removed from outside the Embassy by the Metropolitan Police. During this period, the Picket relocated to the steps of nearby St Martin-in-the-Fields Church and activists repeatedly risked arrest to break the police ban and defend their right to protest outside the Embassy.     

Protest Records,Data Validity,and the Mexican Media: Development and Assessment of a Keyword Search Protocol

While considerable attention has been focused in recent years on questions of selection and coverage biases in media-derived protest data, little has been said about the procedures used to sample media records and scant attention has been paid to non-English-language news sources. This article outlines a Spanish-language keyword search protocol for finding protest event articles, and systematically evaluates it in terms of search validity and efficiency using a two-year dataset constructed from a full-text article search of the Mexican national news agency Noticias de Mexico. Results suggest that this protocol generates data with a high degree of search validity with respect to locating reports of conventional protest event forms, but is problematic with respect to the identification of unconventional protest forms. The significance of these findings for the broader investigation of media-derived protest data is discussed, and directions for future research are outlined.     

Poetry in motion: protest songwriting as strategic resource (Portugal,circa 1974)

In this article, we use protest songs written in Portugal in the periods surrounding the Carnations Revolution to suggest that artists have the capacity to use their artistic discourses as strategic resources, attempting to shape socio‐political reality. We identify three periods in the Portuguese revolution wherein this instrumental use of art becomes patent. We further suggest that organisational managers should take into account the subjective artistic reality, especially in periods when it can affect the organisational context.     

Reproductive rights or duties? The rhetoric of division in social media debates on abortion law in Poland

ABSTRACT

This study explores the argumentative schemas used in claim-making and the rhetorical resources for stance-taking in the online abortion law debate in Poland in late 2016. It shows how these discursive devices were used to divide and discredit the opponent in the social media by two social movements: the Stop Abortion coalition of conservative and religious organizations that sponsored the legislative proposal to considerably restrict abortion, and the Save Women committee that stood behind the ‘black’ protests opposing the project. The textual material is drawn from social media profiles of the two movements following a week of intense street protests and publicity activities (19–26 October 2016). It is subjected to contrastive argument analysis and critical discourse analysis of rhetorical resources. The analysis involves comparing (1) the discrepant premises underpinning arguments in the process of claim-making; (2) the reverse distribution of legitimization techniques deployed; and (3) the choices of name-calling devices aimed at discrediting antagonists.     

美国黑人小说的主题嬗变

文章从分析美国黑人文学各个阶段的主要小说入手,以时间为序,结合美国的历史背景,揭示美国黑人小说主题由血泪史到抗议再到自省的嬗变过程,并兼及其艺术手法由现实主义到现代主义的转变。     

The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions In and Around Social Movements

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context-specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other.