I recently published a chapter in the De Gruyter Handbook of Political Control edited by Jennifer Earl and Jessica Maves Baithwaite. This chapter pulls together some theoretical discussions about repression and social control that I wrote some time ago but never published. The abstract is: This chapter provides theoretical tools
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Black protests about workers and economic issues
One of the things that surprised our team as we read and coded Black newspaper articles about protests was the high frequency of protests by and about workers in Black newspapers. We also saw a lot of coverage of protests about cuts in public services in cities with high Black
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Black protests about policing in 1990s and 2000s: Time trends
There were many US Black protests about policing before the Black Lives Matter protests after 2014. Drawing on archives of 950 articles including 310 from three mainstream newswire services and 640 from 37 Black newspapers as sources of information, we identified about 1,059 Black-relevant protest events about policing in the
Read moreJena 6 Publication
My collaborators and I have just published The Jena 6: Of Nooses, Fights, Narratives, and Movement Building is available online and in print from Cambridge Elements. It can be downloaded free May 5 to May 19, 2026. I have a lot of fun working on this project, which developed as
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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