#BlackLivesMatter: Innovative Black Resistance

Since 2013, extrajudicial police killings of black people have captured the attention of U.S. and international media, substantially because of the work of leaders in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement. #BLM is simultaneously a group of localized organizations and a broad online social movement. In this article, we examine the #BLM movement in detail, with particular emphasis on the following aspects of the movement: (1) its innovative organizational practices and social media use; (2) its accent on black perspectives (counterframing) of systemic racial oppression, heteronormativity, and capitalism; and (3) its broad emphasis on oppressed Americans, including black women and LGBTQ people. We also situate the #BLM movement within the surrounding system of racial oppression, including the historical role of racialized policing in maintaining social control of blacks. We detail the long tradition of black social movements, especially black feminist organizing, against systemic racial oppression. In doing so, we intend to contribute social movement theorizing that more fully considers powerful counterframed perspectives of black activists in U.S. social movements. Although the #BLM movement reflects black feminism and past civil rights movement struggles, it is a uniquely twenty‐first‐century social movement that uses new technologies for innovative social protest.     

Participatory shaping of community futures in e‐waste processing hubs: Complexity,conflict and stewarded convergence in a Palestinian context

This article describes an unconventional participatory development approach carried out in an informal e‐waste hub in South‐West Hebron, an area that has collected and processed the bulk of Israeli e‐waste for over a decade. Our approach contributes to the critique and recovery of community representation in participatory development and the search for ways to facilitate representative community engagement. Specifically, we describe our use of a novel Delphi‐like method that allowed us to facilitate a broadly endorsed development trajectory within a heterogeneous and conflicted community. We show how the results yielded by this approach diverged from those that were likely to emerge from more facile forms of participation in ways that are important for other similar e‐waste hubs internationally, which face a destructive status quo on the one hand, or the economically ruinous international policies that ban e‐waste trade from “developed” to “developing” countries on the other. Despite real tensions and cleavages within the affected communities, the process described facilitated a shift from deadlocked environmental versus livelihood positions towards building capacity and regulating existing informal e‐waste trades to preserve livelihoods dependent on these.     

Celebrating Joan Acker: Sociologist,fearless feminist,friend

Joan Acker's life reflects a time when middle‐class women were expected to be satisfied with maintaining the home front, serving husbands and children, not having paid‐work careers. After living “the ideal” for 37 years, Acker took a new path by earning a Ph. D. and producing path‐breaking scholarship that challenged taken‐for‐granted beliefs about gender, family, work, and organizations. Acker spoke “truth to power” and was an academic heroine in posing feminist challenges to injustices involving gender, social class, and race/ethnicity, particularly (but not solely) related to the workplace. This overview lets Joan tell her story and offers reflections on her milestone publications as seen by Pat Martin.     

Pussy grabs back: bestialized sexual politics and intersectional failure in protest posters for the 2017 women’s march

The women’s march on Washington on January 21 2017 and its more than 600 sister marches across the world was characterized by its distinctly feline theme. Most notable were the pink pussy hats and a multitude of signs that played on the historical association between women and cats to resist the crude remarks made by US presidential nominee Donald Trump who bragged of grabbing women “by the pussy.” This article explores this feline counterframing from a vegan feminist perspective. A content analysis was performed on photographs that were published in Why I March (2017) and uploaded to the Women’s March on Washington Archives Project, the Georgia State University Women’s Marches 2017 Collection, and Instagram in Spring 2017. Results illustrate the persistent role that animality plays in feminist politics, but they also point to a critical intersectional failure exhibited by an ultimately anthropocentric collective.     

权利视角下工时制度演进的历史回顾

工时制度历经数百余年的演进过程,从超越人体极限的十几个小时至现代社会适度工作时间的实现,各种权利思想扮演了重要角色。伴随启蒙运动中普遍性权利的觉醒,部分人权思想如平等、自由为后来工时制度演变起到了启蒙作用,启蒙运动后社会权的进一步发展则使劳动者实现了向社会人地位的转变。资本主义的发展使劳动时间的价值凸显并且劳动时间不断被延长,伴随着劳动者地位的改善及工人阶级权利意识的觉醒,工人发起缩短工时的罢工运动并成为工时制度演变的直接推动力。适度性是工时制度所追求的目标,伴随着各方的博弈,工时演变的最终结果是实现了各方的适度性,推动了社会的发展。     

论弱势群体的社会法保护

弱势群体的大量存在引发一系列的社会问题,成为构建和谐社会的一大障碍。社会法作为兼具公法与私法双重属性的第三法域,可以为弱势群体提供最佳的保护。我国保护弱势群体的法律制度还不健全,对弱势群体的保护仍存在不足,应进一步完善社会法,向弱势群体倾斜,保障和促进弱势群体享有劳动权、社会保障权、结社权等各项基本人权。     

Aged women,witchcraft, and social relations among the Igbo in South-Eastern Nigeria

Belief in the existence of witchcraft has remained a social phenomenon in Igbo society, especially with aged women who are often labeled witches. This study is exploratory and explains the implication of labeling an aged woman a witch and social relations in Igbo society in South-Eastern Nigeria. Twenty interviews were conducted with aged women who are victims of the witchcraft label and their relatives using qualitative methods of data collection, key informant interviews, and in-depth interviews. Data collected were analyzed using ethnographic content analysis. Findings reveal different social views attached to witchcraft and how it relates to aged women.     

“But we still try”: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog

This article studies three “mommy blogs,” online platforms catering to (in these cases) American mothers of various sub-demographics, through an affective labor framework. Using digital labor and Althusserian subject formation to inform my reading of the common rhetorical gestures made in these blogs, I ask how they conceive of their readership and contributors. I argue that mommy blogs should be understood as sites of digital labor because of the ways in which their publishing conditions and rhetorics establish labored expectations of the “mommy” subject. Contestations of the nature of affective labor in motherhood are reflected by anxieties around digital labor, which play out via ideological conflicts that manifest rhetorically in the blogs under discussion. This analysis is informed by affect theory, Althusser and Butler’s work on subject formation, and the existing feminist literature on digital labor and the mommy blog.     

Bad News Has Wings: Dread Risk Mediates Social Amplification in Risk Communication

Social diffusion of information amplifies risk through processes of birth, death, and distortion of message content. Dread risk—involving uncontrollable, fatal, involuntary, and catastrophic outcomes (e.g., terrorist attacks and nuclear accidents)—may be particularly susceptible to amplification because of the psychological biases inherent in dread risk avoidance. To test this, initially balanced information about high or low dread topics was given to a set of individuals who then communicated this information through diffusion chains, each person passing a message to the next. A subset of these chains were also reexposed to the original information. We measured prior knowledge, perceived risk before and after transmission, and, at each link, number of positive and negative statements. Results showed that the more a message was transmitted the more negative statements it contained. This was highest for the high dread topic. Increased perceived risk and production of negative messages was closely related to the amount of negative information that was received, with domain knowledge mitigating this effect. Reexposure to the initial information was ineffectual in reducing bias, demonstrating the enhanced danger of socially transmitted information.     

民族历史构建与现实社会因素(续)

保安族在50年代被正式识别为一个民族,对其族源曾有多种观点。但是在建国50年后,保安族的历史和族源观被再次重构,这个过程既反映了现实民族关系对历史书写的映射,也反映了民族精英在历史重构中的能动性。对保安族的这个实例的分析可以帮助我们更深刻地认识现实社会因素能够如何影响民族历史的构建,这个案例所反映出来的族群历史建构模式对于研究我国的"民族历史建构和族群群体的认同结构也颇具启发意义。