Pamela Oliver
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 moreA 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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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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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
Read moreI’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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Update: The latest version of this paper has a new title, updated numbers that include more events identified in the process of reviewing and cleaning the data, and a somewhat different emphasis, but the basic findings are much the same. The SocArXiv link will take you to the latest version
Read moreGeneral Background The events in Cincinnati were often referred to as the largest riot or rebellion since 1992 in Los Angeles and/or the largest riot or rebellion in Cincinnati since the 1960s. On Saturday April 7 2001, 19 year old Timothy Thomas was shot and killed while running away from
Read moreOur research project is using articles from mainstream newswires (as archived in the Linguistic Data Consortium’s Annotated English Gigaword) and Black newspapers to identify Black protest events in the 1990s and 2000s. This is an under-studied period in Black movement history. In this article we summarize the most newsworthy episodes
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Although many discussions imply nothing happened between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter, we find that Black protests in the 1990s and 2000s seem continuous with what came later.
Read moreMuch excellent work has been written about the need for systemic reform of policing in the US, the discrimination and inequalities faced by Black Americans, and the brave struggles of anti-racist protesters amidst the ongoing police repression and the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic. As social movements go, the ongoing mobilizations
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