Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Joshua Dubler ◽  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Race And Politics ◽  
Prison Culture ◽  
American Prison

Contemporary American culture is infused with carceral logics that foreground punishment. However, the United States also has a rich tradition of abolitionism, which catalyzes social movements against entrenched injustice. Just as American prison culture is imbued with religion, American abolition culture is also imbued with religion. For this reason, the authors ask what role religion played in underwriting the explosive growth of prisons over the last five decades, as well as what role religion plays in sustaining mass incarceration today. In doing so, the authors weave religion into stories about economics, race, and politics that are told to explain the explosive growth of prisons in the United States. For the movement to “end mass incarceration” to win, this book argues, it must embrace abolitionism, not just reform. Religious ideas and rituals have much to contribute to this process, resourcing a social movement to end the carceral state and its attendant injustices.

Inequality and the Carceral State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Gottschalk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Institutionalism ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Cross National ◽  
The Welfare State

Some of the most promising work on mass incarceration, the retributive turn in penal policy, and growing inequalities in the United States employs a historical institutional lens. This work has illuminated the origins of the carceral state and the possibilities for dismantling it, the sources of interstate and cross-national variations in penal policy, and the role of race, gender, and the transformation of the welfare state in the construction of the carceral state. Going forward, illumination of pressing political problems like the carceral state will require that historical institutionalism retain or resurrect some of the qualities that originally made it so distinctive—even if that cuts against the grain of the wider discipline of political science.

More Just Futures are Possible: Connecting Post Qualitative Inquiry and Social Movement Organizing

2020 ◽  
pp. 194084472096819
Author(s):  
Briana M. Bivens
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Ontological Turn

In this article, I explore how post qualitative inquiry can connect with social movement organizing in the United States to expand the scope of what’s possible for thought, action, and justice. I briefly review social movement organizing’s alignment with emancipatory theories and gesture toward the promise and importance of a collaboration between liberation struggles and theories that critique humanist and modernist thought. Poststructuralism, in particular, enables an exploration of that which might be but is not-yet and a deconstructive ethic of unsettling normalized categories, offering generative heuristics for thinking about power and justice without falling into descriptions that essentialize and homogenize. Post qualitative inquiry offers a starting point for considering how social movements might operationalize poststructural theories and theories of the ontological turn. It encourages experimentation and the creation of different ways to think/act in the face of not knowing what else to do. I argue that features of post qualitative inquiry can be useful not just in conventional research settings but also in the community organizing settings from which social movements often emerge.

Repression and Crime Control: Why Social Movement Scholars Should Pay Attention to Mass Incarceration as a Form of Repression

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Oliver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The 1960S

The disciplinary insurgency that created the academic field of social movement studies distinguished dissent from crime. This dichotomy has led the field to ignore the relation between the repression of dissent and the control of "ordinary" crime. There was massive repression in the wake of the Black riots of the 1960s that did not abate when the riots abated. The acceleration of the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States after 1980 suggests the possibility that crime control and especially the drug war have had the consequence of repressing dissent among the poor. Social movement scholars have failed to recognize these trends as repression because of the theoretical turn that built too strong a conceptual wall between crime and dissent. Revisiting this dichotomy is essential for understanding repression today.

scholarly journals Gender and Social Movements

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Chatillon ◽  
Verta Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
The Impact

The sociological study of gender and social movements is relatively new. Until the 1970s, scholarship on social movements largely neglected questions of feminism and gender, and the fields of gender and social movements consisted of separate literatures. As a result, the major theories of social movements failed to take into account the impact of gender on the emergence, nature, and outcomes of social movements. But as mass feminist activism flourished in the United States and around the globe, so too did scholarship on gender and social movements. The earliest work in this area focused on women’s movements, both feminist and antifeminist, and applied the concepts and perspectives of social movement theory without explicitly taking into consideration the impact of gender. These studies, along with research on men’s movements, brought gender to the attention of social movement scholars by acknowledging women’s participation in political protest and men’s political experiences in gender movements, which had been ignored by mainstream social movement theory. But this body of work failed to consider systematically the effects of gender on political activism. By the 1990s, a new wave of research began to reconceptualize the relationship between gender and social movements by attending not only to how gender affects social movement structures and processes, but how social movements, in turn, affect gender. Many social movements have targeted the structures, cultural practices, and interactional norms that sustain gender inequality. Further, movements that are not oriented specifically around gender issues are also shaped by gender as a central feature of social structure, culture, and everyday life. Scholarship at the intersection of the fields of gender and social movements has had a significant impact on the cultural turn in social movement research, as well as on mainstream theories of social movements. Examining social movements through a gender lens has advanced several areas of social movement inquiry: (1) collective identity and intersectionality, (2) collective action frames, (3) movement leadership and organizations, (4) political and cultural opportunity structures and constraints, (5) movement tactics and strategies, and (6) movement outcomes. The research in this subfield and, correspondingly, this article, focuses primarily—but not exclusively—on the United States. The literature on gender and social movements has exposed many underexplored dimensions of social activism and has been foundational for the development of intersectional approaches to social movements. There is still much to learn by applying an intersectional approach that considers how power structures such as race, class, gender, and nationality intersect and the implications for social movement processes.

North American and Australian LGBT Movement and Interest Groups

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry L. Tadlock ◽  
Christopher Glick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Gay Rights Movement ◽  
Lgbt Movement

A study of the LGBT movement within Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Australia reveals the movement’s youth and vitality. Only since the mid-1900s has there been what one might identify as an organized social movement within any of these four countries. A key similarity across the social movements in these four countries has been the formation of associated interest groups. These groups have transformed the LGBT movement. Scholarly research regarding the movement and its attendant interest groups reveals decades of growth and development. These changes over the years allow scholars to investigate topics such as how the LGBT movement compares to other social movements, how various sexual and gender minority communities have been incorporated into the larger movement, and how movement groups have utilized various strategies in pursuit of movement goals. In the United States, the gay rights movement was one of a few distinct movements included within a larger new social movement. These various movements shared the fact they were organized around a goal of identity expression. (The extent to which a gay rights movement morphed into a broader LGBT movement is also an important part of the U.S. story.) In Canada, the modern movement for LGBT individuals exemplified a gradual process rising out of the post–World War era; it was attached to a rise in Quebecois nationalism and the growth of First Nations peoples’ rights movements. Conversely, Australia has seen a slower progression than Canada or the United States, in part because Australia has had a relatively inactive set of social rights movements over the same period. (There is evidence that Australian social rights movements came to consciousness more from a global than a domestic narrative.) Finally, with respect to Mexico, one might assume that LGBT successes there have lagged behind those in the United States because of a more vibrant social movement community in the United States and also because Mexicans are assumed by some to be more religious than residents of the United States. However, there is evidence that the LGBT movement has had greater electoral and policy successes in Mexico. This could in part be due to a history in Mexico of LGBT activists identifying with other revolutionary agents who sought broad structural changes in that country.

Violence, Social Movements, and Black Freedom Struggles

Contention ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
AK Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Freedom Struggles

George Floyd’s murder by police on 26 May 2020 set off a cycle of struggle that was notable for its size, intensity, and rate of diffusion. Starting in Minneapolis, the uprising quickly spread to dozens of other major cities and brought with it a repertoire that included riots, arson, and looting. In many places, these tactics coexisted with more familiar actions like public assemblies and mass marches; however, the inflection these tactics gave to the cycle of contention is not easily reconciled with the protest repertoire most frequently mobilized during movement campaigns in the United States today. This discrepancy has led to extensive commentary by scholars and movement participants, who have often weighed in by considering the moral and strategic efficacy of the chosen tactics. Such considerations should not be discounted. Nevertheless, I argue that both the dynamics of contention witnessed during the uprising and their ambivalent relationship to the established protest repertoire must first be understood in historical terms. By considering the relationship between violence, social movements, and Black freedom struggles in this way, I argue that scholars can develop a better understanding of current events while anticipating how the dynamics of contention are likely to develop going forward. Being attentive to these dynamics should in turn inform our research agendas, and it is with this aim in mind that I offer the following ten theses.

The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin E. Zimring
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Single Generation ◽  
American Life ◽  
Peak Rate ◽  
Or Practice

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?

scholarly journals Race and Politics in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Howard A. Palley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Race And Politics ◽  
Inalienable Rights

Abstract The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma still affects our politics --- in a significant manner.

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