My collaborators and I have just published The Jena 6: Of Nooses, Fights, Narratives, and Movement Building will soon be available online and in print from Cambridge Elements. You will be able to download it for free for thirty days when it is first published. I’ll edit this post when
Read moreStrategic Thinking
Below is the text of an essay I wrote in 2018 for Contexts (Volume 17 No 2 pages 13-15). I’d forgotten about it until I came across it today. This was written in the first Trump administration before the fall 2018 midterm elections, before COVID and George Floyd, before Biden
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Mapping Jena
In support of the piece I’m writing about the Jena 6 campaign, I commissioned two maps to help tell the story. Both were prepared by student cartographer Anya Shaw, who works for the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab. I am impressed by their esthetic qualities as well as by the
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Reporting About the Jena 6 Rally
Tens of thousands of mostly Black people converged on Jena, Louisiana on September 20, 2007. Drawing on our cache of articles from Black newspapers and mainstream newswires, we examine how the rally was covered. The sample is 44 mainstream newswire articles and 84 Black newspaper articles that mentioned the big
Read moreReporting What Happened in Jena
A major part of the Jena 6 story I’m telling is the differences between what the original sources said happened and what later narratives said happened. These differences point to narrative impulses in telling stories and in movement building. This older blog narrates the story. The sources to be compared
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Comparing News Coverage and Google Trends About Jena
The last two posts gave details about trends in media coverage and Google searches about Jena. In this post, I put the two series together to see how they relate. First, we look at the close-up of coverage and trends in the 40 days around the big protest. The plots
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Google Trends About Jena
This is another post that is a supplement to the piece I’m revising about the Jena 6 protest in 2007. That piece will be published by the Cambridge Elements Contentious Politics series. The goal is to use Google Trends to see if I could determine whether any of the early
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News Coverage of the Jena 6
On September 20, 2007, tens of thousands of Black people converged on the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana to protest charging six boys with attempted murder after a school fight in which the victim, while knocked unconscious and injured, had been able to attend an event that evening. The
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Jena Videos
The Jena Six protest happened on September 20, 2007. The Jena Six had been charged after a December 2006 fight. In this blog I’ve collected links to some videos, images, and retrospectives about the case. I expect to return to this site to edit it to make it more organized.
Read moreConclusions about Jena 6 Mobilization – a draft
I’ve just submitted the draft of my piece about the Jena 6 that is a substantial extension and revision of the blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. It will need a 20% cut before publication and responses of editors and reviewers may lead me to rethink my
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