Pamela Oliver
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
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
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
Read moreChloe Haimson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, haimson@wisc.edu Note: This piece is based on research collected for a forthcoming paper in Mobilization. In recent weeks, heated interactions nationwide between protesters and police, were sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American, by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.
Read moreAs a citizen and human being, I have watched the recent news coming out of Charlottesville with the same horror as many others have felt. White nationalists displaying Nazi symbols, brawling, and someone purposely driving a car into a crowd are all upsetting. As a scholar of social movements and
Read moreMajority and minority protest movements have some structural differences and coalitions between majorities and minorities are fraught with difficulties. I’ve posted what I hope is close to the final version of my “Ethnic Dimensions in Social Movements” paper on SocArXiv while it awaits review for publication. It began life as
Read moreA protest field is like a ball game . . . [with] 12 teams, each trying to win with a somewhat different vision of what winning would mean, employing a wide variety of different kinds of tactics, forming temporary coalitions with other teams, trying to out-guess and out-think those opposed to their interests, and having somewhat different ideas of what the legitimate rules of the game are.
Read moreThe Mobilizing Ideas blog has partnered with Jenn Earl’s Youth Activism Project which (as the name implies) studies activism by younger people) to provide advice to young activists by way of videos of top social movement scholars addressing important issues in organizing, supplemented with suggestions for further reading. The series
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