Building a digital Girl Army: The cultivation of feminist safe spaces online

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 2125-2144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Clark-Parsons
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

“Safe spaces” emerged as an important activist tactic in the late twentieth-century United States with the rise of feminist, queer, and anti-racist movements. However, the term’s ambiguity, while denoting its wide applicability across movements, has led “safe space” to become overused but undertheorized. In both theory and praxis, “safe space” has been treated as a closed concept, erasing the context-specific relational work required to construct and maintain its material and symbolic boundaries. The emergence of online communities promising safety for marginalized groups calls for renewed investigations into the construction of these activist spaces. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the cultivation of safe space within Girl Army, a Philadelphia-based feminist Facebook group. Through participant observation and interviews with Girl Army members, I trace the group’s technical and discursive enforcement of safety and the role this space plays in members’ activism and everyday lives.

Safe Spaces: Gay-Straight Alliances in High School

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Fetner ◽  
Athena Elafros ◽  
Sandra Bortolin ◽  
Coralee Drechsler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
High School ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
High Schools ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
The People

In activists' circles as in sociology, the concept "safe space" has beenapplied to all sorts of programs, organizations, and practices. However,few studies have specified clearly what safe spaces are and how theysupport the people who occupy them. In this paper, we examine one sociallocation typically understood to be a safe space: gay-straight alliancegroups in high schools. Using qualitative interviews with young adults inthe United States and Canada who have participated in gay-straightalliances, we examine the experiences of safe spaces in these groups. Weunpack this complex concept to consider some of the dimensions along whichsafe spaces might vary. Participants identified several types of safespace, and from their observations we derive three inter-related dimensionsof safe space: social context, membership and activity.

Japanese Multinationals in the United States: Continuity and Change, 1879–1990

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Direct Investment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.

scholarly journals Corporate Defaults, Workouts, and the Rise of the Distressed Asset Investment Industry

2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Cumming ◽  
Grant Fleming
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Scale Effects ◽  
The United States ◽  
Corporate Restructuring ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

We examine the formation and growth of the distressed asset investment industry during the late twentieth century, with specific focus on the strategies of the leading firms. The distressed asset investment industry is dominated by firms based in the United States and is relatively concentrated, due in large part to early movers developing distinctive investment capabilities through participation in landmark transactions, relationship-specific resources, and exploitation of scale effects. We argue that the participation of these firms in the bankruptcy and corporate restructuring markets has resulted in private-sector workouts becoming more competitive and more efficient over the last thirty years, especially in the United States.

The Rise of Supermax Imprisonment in the United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Keramet Reiter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Contact ◽  
Seriously Mentally Ill ◽  
Supermax Prisons ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fluorescent Lighting ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Harsh Conditions

This chapter provides an overview of the history of supermax prisons: facilities built across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s in order to hold “problem” prisoners, like gang members, the seriously mentally ill, the extremely violent, and those sentenced to death, in solitary confinement for months and years at a time. Since nearly every state opened one of these facilities in the late twentieth century, prisoners have litigated the constitutionality of the harsh conditions: no human contact, 24-hour fluorescent lighting, limited time outdoors. In spite of these conditions, supermaxes were not just another popular tough-on-crime innovation; state (not federal) prison administrators designed the first supermaxes with little public knowledge or oversight, in response to organized protests in prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. Although prisoners have sought to challenge these facilities, litigation has, in many cases, played a legitimizing in the history of supermaxes.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
News Media ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Child Safety ◽  
Bereaved Parents ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The introduction sketches the contours of the book. It details the construction of a moral panic concerning the abduction of children by strangers in the late twentieth century and lays out the political and cultural ramifications of this panic. As the introduction indicates and the rest of the book demonstrates, this panic—precipitated by the bereaved parents of missing and slain children, the news media, and politicians—led to the consolidation of a “child safety regime” and the expansion of the American carceral state. The introduction situates this argument within the existing historiography of late twentieth-century United States politics and culture, as well as the growing literature on carceral studies.

Crimesploitation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kaplan ◽  
Daniel LaChance
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Television Programming ◽  
Folk Knowledge ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Crimesploitation is a kind of reality television programming that depicts nonactors committing, detecting, prosecuting, and punishing criminal behavior. In programs like Cops, To Catch a Predator, and Intervention, a real-life-documentary frame creates a sense of verisimilitude that intensifies the show’s emotionally stimulating qualities and sets it apart from fictional crime stories. Crimesploitation programs create folk knowledge about the causes and consequences of criminal behavior and the purposes and effects of criminal punishment. That folk knowledge, in turn, reflects and reinforces two ideologies that legitimized the ratcheting up of harsh punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States: law-and-order punitivism and neoliberalism.

scholarly journals Once Again, They Have a Word for It: Greeks Talk about Our Global Age

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike-Frank Epitropoulos ◽  
John Markoff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Global Era ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractFrom its beginnings in eighteenth-century revolution through the great global wave of democratizations that began in the 1970s, the term “democracy” has been used in many different ways but always referred to a form of self-rule of a defined people on a defined territory. The very obvious web of transnational interconnection had by the late twentieth century raised important questions about what democracy could mean in the global era. Everyday speech in Greece has for several decades been taking note of this by referring to the President of the United States as the Planetarch, a major figure whom they had no role in selecting. We use interviews from just before the elections of 2008 that brought Barack Obama to office to explore what Greeks mean by this term and conclude by showing that it provides a framework for them to talk about his successor, President Donald Trump, as well.

scholarly journals Matter Unmoored: Trash, Archaeological Consciousness and American Culture and Fiction in the 1980s

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 553-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIM JELFS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Public Policy Issue ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Epistemological Complexity

This article considers the cultural significance of the garbage panics of the 1980s, including the voyage of the infamous Mobro 4000 “garbage barge.” The article argues that the trash at the centre of these panics is important to our understanding of both the 1980s and the present because it demanded – and still demands – that Americans see and understand it as a class of matter unmoored from temporal as well as spatial boundaries. The alarming durability of the supposedly ephemeral refuse of a culture of mass consumption invoked an “archaeological consciousness” prone to muse upon the longevity of material remains. This consciousness was expressed in various cultural and discursive arenas throughout the 1980s, revealing that durable detritus was not just a pressing public policy issue but a marker of cultural anxieties emerging out of the operations of archaeological consciousness. From concerns about contingency of the mass-consuming culture of the late twentieth-century United States to reflections on trash's own epistemological complexity, trash spoke in unexpected ways throughout the 1980s, raising important questions about the relationship between producers of culture and their audience, whose receptiveness to the urgencies of archaeological consciousness suffers from a frustrating transience as far as trash is concerned.

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