Why We Gather: Educational Empowerment and Academic Success Through Collective Black Parental Agency

Though previous literature has explored the importance of parents in education, scholarship has failed to empirically demonstrate the influence voluntary parent groups have on the educational trajectory of Black students. Using institutional agency and community cultural wealth frameworks, the author qualitatively evaluates a Black parent group’s self-initiated efforts to influence the academic outcomes of high-achieving students. The author illustrates how one parent organization negotiates an environment in which their racial group comprises less than 5% of the population to effectively guide and support families as their students navigate academic success. Findings show that at least three critical components— accountability, alliances and networks, and legitimacy—are vital in the provision of collaborative support and agency on behalf of high-achieving students.

Media and Responsibility for Their Effects: Instrumental vs. Environmental Views

From the perspective of media ecology, this paper explores the question of responsibility for the effects that media have on society. To explain these media effects, two approaches are singled out. (1) The instrumental approach assumes that a medium works as a tool used by a user for a purpose. (2) The environmental approach focuses on the capacity of a medium to become an environmental force that reshapes both the habitat and the inhabitants. The instrumental approach to media, when taken too broadly and without an understanding of its limits, leads to conspiracy theories and inadequate social and political assessments. The more advanced and sophisticated environmental approach allows for an adequate understanding of media evolution and its effects but does not comply with the traditional legal notions of guilt and responsibility for actions, as there is no jurisdictional human or institutional agency when environmental forces are in play. After charting the distinction between the instrumental and environmental views of media, the paper focused on how the instrumental effects of media turn into environmental effects. The purpose of the paper is to develop and offer a media ecological apparatus for possible further juridical discussions regarding the regulation of the networking society.

Black Woman Museum Activism "From Inside": Theorizing a Twenty-First Century Decolonization Movement Within the Colonial U.S. Museum

What are the constitutive features of a transnational African women contemporary visual artist resistance movement from inside the colonial U.S. museum? How are accomplished women contemporary visual artists, from different countries within the continent of Africa, yet currently based in the U.S., returning the gaze on American museal culture? How should the woman black Atlantic audience respond to the museum institution's efforts to reframe its colonial legacies? Considering these research questions, I argued that when women contemporary visual artists from Africa are afforded the space to exhibit their artwork in the colonial U.S. museum, they return the gaze on colonial museum culture, advocate for themselves, other African artists, and as a result, the traditional colonial U.S. museum could potentially reframe its identity, transform into a dynamic site for sustained political activism, and become a more equitable space to feature artistic expressions from other non-white perspectives.This qualitative study grounded in critical postcolonial feminist theory drew from extant cultural studies and museum studies literature to elucidate how successful black Atlantic resistance movements are traditionally mobilized by activists who have closely analyzed white supremacist ideology from inside systemically oppressive institutions, by means of white insiders initially granting them that access. It employed a method of psychoanalysis to theorize how transnational African women contemporary visual artists who were granted access to exhibit in colonial U.S. museums can potentially harness their institutional agency to mobilize a resistance movement from inside the institution.

A New Direction in the Study of Ancient Maya Economics

This chapter presents a critique of factors inhibiting progress in Maya economic studies, an introduction to approaches that avoid those pitfalls and examples of successful applications of strategic management theory and sociological organization studies. Some errors identified in current studies include shifts in terminology from relative to absolute; huge spatial and temporal frames of reference obscuring patterns and creating continuities, thus minimizing the degree of change; arguments unacceptable in logical and scientific discourse to criticize alternative interpretations, and other fallacies. Strategic management analysis can be applied to specific features of economies, avoiding such errors and overly broad typological concepts (e.g., “market economy,” “redistribution,” “barter,” “inalienable property”). Instead specific aspects of those and other parts of economies are studied as sets composed of variable elements each of which can be evaluated on relative scales. Successful recent applications to Maya economy are summarized, guiding to a vast literature in the sociology organization and of strategic management on “embeddedness,” manipulation of the “biographies of things,” “economic cultures,” “Trust,” innovation legitimation, vertical integration, institutional agency, and hopefully, providing a new direction in the study of Maya economies.

The articulation of ‘agency’: How can public relations scholarship and institutional theory enrich each other?

A recent critical turn to both public relations and institutional studies has highlighted ‘agency’ as a shared important theme. While public relations scholars call to bring back ‘agency’ into analysis of practice and process of public relations, neo-institutionalists use ‘agency’ to explain heterogeneity and innovation in institutional outcomes. In this context, this article proposes to use ‘agency’ as a meeting ground to explore how the two disciplines could engage in a dialogue that improves mutual understanding and theoretical enrichment of each other. It argues that institutional thoughts such as ‘embedded agency’, ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ and ‘institutional work’ advance understandings of the downplayed issues of power, diversity and activism in the public relations literature. In turn, the multi-paradigmatic public relations scholarship provides useful tools for analysing institutional agency. Also, this article discusses future research agenda to advance fruitful collaboration between the two domains.

How actors move from primary agency to institutional agency: A conceptual framework and empirical application

This article contributes to the understanding of actors and agency in the theorization of institutional work. We analyse institutional work as a specific kind of social action that involves exercising institutional agency (with an articulate awareness of institutions) as opposed to primary agency (taking institutions for granted). We propose a conceptual framework for combining a view of actors, who have agency and may engage in institutional work, with a view of actors as socially constructed, in line with critical-realist ontology. Applying this framework to the empirical case of the Spanish social movement 15M, we examine how actors moved from having primary agency to having institutional agency and how organization mattered for this process. We find that organizing by experienced organizers, the founding of new organizations and prefigurative organization were of crucial importance for the increase in institutional agency.

In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public Education

The dominant framing of the work of public school districts in the United States prevents schools from contesting the indignities they themselves or their neighbors suffer. This incapacitates teachers and learning communities to work toward the attainment of inclusive democracy and the contestation of exclusionary practices and policies. An institutionally-grown advocacy of connection that nurtures intercommunity solidarity can help us redefine the work communities do as they learn to think of themselves as being in connection with other groups in a web of affiliation and care. I suggest that public education take on an informal function of ethical oversight rooted in a strong sense of collective institutional agency. Through such agency schools can recognize and respect and help us work through past and present civic grievances while addressing economic and social realities that give rise to feelings of indignation.