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
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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Coverage of Black Anti-Police Protests
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 moreCincinnati 2001: Police Killing of Timothy Thomas and Insurrection
General 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 moreBiggest Black Movement Criminal-Legal News Stories 1994-2010
Our 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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Black Protests in the US, 1994-2010
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 moreRecent Anti-Police Brutality Protests Since George Floyd’s Death are Far Larger than Previous Black Lives Matter Protest Waves
Much 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
Read moreThe Struggle for Criminal Justice Reform
This is a guest post by Michelle Phelps, Joshua Page, and Philip Goodman. The history of criminal justice in the U.S. is often described as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between strict punishment and lenient rehabilitation. Before the election of President Donald J. Trump, many argued the pendulum was
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