Mobilizing Public Sociology


Book Description

Mobilizing Public Sociology, coedited by Victoria Carty and Rafael Luévano, combines theory and scholarly perspectives with a grassroots approach to challenges that Latin@ immigrants face in the United States. Public sociology calls for scholars and community activists and practitioners to engage in dialogue and to work together in the struggle for social justice. The contributors to this collection—scholars, immigrants, practitioners, and community activists—share their scholarly perspectives and personal experiences on a wide range of issues related to immigration, including deportation and criminalization, undocumented youth and higher education, legislation, and community activism. The collection encourages ongoing collaboration in dealing with some of the most pressing problems affecting our communities with the hope of breaking down barriers and misconceptions. Contributors are: Amelia Alvarez, Fawn Bekam, Victoria Carty, Kristin E. Heyer, Patricia Huerta, Rusty Kennedy, Oliver Lopez, Rafael Luévano, Raquel R. Marquez, Eileen McNerney, Patrick Murphy, Jerry Price, Lisa D. Ramirez, Harriett D. Romo, Suzanne SooHoo, Madeleine Spencer, Daniele Struppa, and Bishop Kevin William Vann.




Mobilizing Public Opinion


Book Description

List of Tables and Figures Introduction 1. Elite Opinion Theory and Activated Mass Opinion 2. Black Insurgency and the Dynamics of Mass Opinion 3. The Sovereign Status of Survey Data 4. Constituency Mail as Public Opinion 5. The Racial, Regional, and Organizational Bases of Mass Activation 6. Contested Meanings and Movement Agency 7. Two Nations, Separate Grooves Appendix One: Question Wording, Scales, and Coding of Variables in Survey Analysis Appendix Two: Bibliographic Sources for Racial Attitude Items, 1937-1965 Appendix Three: Sampling and Coding of Constituency Mail Appendix Four: Typology of Interpretive Frames Notes References Acknowledgments Index.




Public Sociology


Book Description

Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century. Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline – it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.




The Making of Pro-life Activists


Book Description

How do people become activists for causes they care deeply about? Many people with similar backgrounds, for instance, fervently believe that abortion should be illegal, but only some of them join the pro-life movement. By delving into the lives and beliefs of activists and nonactivists alike, Ziad W. Munson is able to lucidly examine the differences between them. Through extensive interviews and detailed studies of pro-life organizations across the nation, Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion—in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism. The Making of Pro-life Activists provides a compelling new model of how people become activists while also offering a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between religion, politics, and the pro-life movement. Policy makers, activists on both sides of the issue, and anyone seeking to understand how social movements take shape will find this book essential.




The Public Sociology Debate


Book Description

In 2004, Michael Burawoy challenged sociologists to move beyond the ivory tower and into the realm of activism, to engage in public discourses about what society could or should be. His call to arms sparked debate among sociologists. Which side would sociologists take? Would "public sociology" speak for all sociologists? In this volume, leading Canadian experts continue the debate by discussing their discipline's mission and practice and the role that ethics plays in research, theory, and teaching. In doing so, they offer insights as to where their discipline is heading and why it matters to people inside and outside the university.




Social Movements


Book Description

Social Movements cleverly translates the art of collective action and mobilization by excluded groups to facilitate understanding social change from below. Students learn the core components of social movements, the theory and methods used to study them, and the conditions under which they can lead to political and social transformation. This fully class-tested book is the first to be organized along the lines of the major subfields of social movement scholarship—framing, movement emergence, recruitment, and outcomes—to provide comprehensive coverage in a single core text. Features include: use of real data collected in the U.S. and around the world the emphasis on student learning outcomes case studies that bring social movements to life examples of cultural repertoires used by movements (flyers, pamphlets, event data on activist websites, illustrations by activist musicians) to mobilize a group topics such as immigrant rights, transnational movement for climate justice, Women's Marches, Fight for $15, Occupy Wall Street, Gun Violence, Black Lives Matter, and the mobilization of popular movements in the global South on issues of authoritarian rule and neoliberalism With this book, students deepen their understanding of movement dynamics, methods of investigation, and dominant theoretical perspectives, all while being challenged to consider their own place in relation to social movements.




Repression and Mobilization


Book Description

Introduction: repression and mobilization : insights from political science and sociology / Christian Davenport -- Protest mobilization, protest repression, and their interaction / Clark McPhail and John D. McCarthy -- Precarious regimes and matchup problems in the explanation of repressive policy / Vince Boudreau -- The dictator's dilemma / Ronald A. Francisco -- When activists ask for trouble : state-dissident interactions and the New Left cycle of resistance in the United States and Japan / Gilda Zwerman and Patricia Steinhoff -- Talking the walk : speech acts and resistance in authoritarian regimes / Hank Johnston -- Soft repression : ridicule, stigma, and silencing in gender-based movements / Myra Marx Ferree -- Repression and the public sphere : discursive opportunities for repression against the extreme right in Germany in the 1990s / Ruud Koopmans -- On the quantification of horror : notes from the field / Patrick Ball -- Repression, mobilization, and explanation / Charles Tilly -- How to organize your mechanisms : research programs, stylized facts, and historical narratives / Mark Lichbach.




Mobilizing Piety


Book Description

"Investigates how different approaches to religious interpretation influence Indonesian women's engagement with global Islam and feminism. It also explores the consequences of a more public Islam for women's participation in the public sphere. The book is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork between 2002 and 2010 with four different groups of women activists in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. The groups include a secular feminist NGO (Solidaritas Perempuan), a Muslim women's rights NGO (Rahima), the women's group of one of the country's largest Muslim organizations (Fatayat N.U.), and women in a conservative Muslim political party (the Prosperous Justice Party). The women in these have all been deeply influenced by the ongoing Islamic revival. In addition, they are part of the urban middle class. The women of Rahima and Fatayat N.U. are influenced by global feminism and Islamic discourses. They use Islam to express feminist and liberal ideals of equality and rights, and they strive to integrate these frameworks in their own lives. In contrast, women in the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) reject feminism as Western and secular and are more influenced by global Islamic discourses. Although some scholars argue that pious Islam and liberal ideals are incompatible, these activists embrace modernity and sometimes speak in terms of individual agency, empowerment, and rights. The women of Solidaritas Perempuan maintain a balance between their secular activism and personal religiosity. The overall conclusion of Mobilizing Piety is that the Islamic revival has not stymied but has in fact helped to empower many Indonesian women, especially by allowing them to participate in national debates about moral and religious issues"--




Mobilizing Democracy


Book Description

What are the conditions and factors that drive people to protest against government economic policies in the developing world? Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Pacific Sociological Association (2015) Paul Almeida’s comparative study of the largest social movement campaigns that existed between 1980 and 2013 in every Central American country (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama) provides a granular examination of the forces that spark mass mobilizations against state economic policy, whether those factors are electricity rate hikes or water and health care privatization. Many scholars have explained connections between global economic changes and local economic conditions, but most of the research has remained at the macro level. Mobilizing Democracy contributes to our knowledge about the protest groups “on the ground” and what makes some localities successful at mobilizing and others less successful. His work enhances our understanding of what ingredients contribute to effective protest movements as well as how multiple protagonists—labor unions, students, teachers, indigenous groups, nongovernmental organizations, women’s groups, environmental organizations, and oppositional political parties—coalesce to make protest more likely to win major concessions. Based on extensive field research, archival data of thousands of protest events, and interviews with dozens of Central American activists, Mobilizing Democracy brings the international consequences of privatization, trade liberalization, and welfare-state downsizing in the global South into focus and shows how persistent activism and network building are reactivated in these social movements. Almeida enables our comprehension of global and local politics and policy by answering the question, “If all politics is local, then how do the politics of globalization manifest themselves?” Detailed graphs and maps provide a synthesis of the quantitative and qualitative data in this important study. Written in clear, accessible prose, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars in the fields of political science, social movements, anthropology, Latin American studies, and labor studies.