There is a great deal of information available about White nationalist groups. This post compiles some sources that profile the different groups and personalities among today’s White nationalists and also several sources that discuss how these groups operate on the Internet, including Internet trolls. (Trolls are people who make hostile
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
Read moreTactical Dilemmas in Resisting White Nationalists
As 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 moreCreating Protest Event Databases: A New Protocol
In constructing and analyzing new data on Black protests, I’ve come to realize the importance of improving standard protocols for collecting protest event data. Although protest event data has one record per event, these events are recorded in news accounts that talk about multiple events in one article and the
Read moreIntra-movement ethnic/racial conflicts
It is usually difficult for groups to work together across racial-ethnic divides. Research across a wide variety of movements reveals common tensions. I list below some of the common patterns and provide a partial list of references at the end. The first two patterns apply to all groups, whether their relationship
Read moreThoughts about Black Lives Matter in 2017
What a difference a few months makes. The Black Lives Matter movement was getting a lot of media coverage and popular support between 2014 and mid-2016. Multiple sessions at the American Sociological Association meeting were devoted to it. The Vision for Black Lives, prepared by a coalition named the Movement
Read moreEthnic Dimensions in Social Movements
Majority 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 moreAsking the Wrong Questions About Protest
A 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 moreNews Coverage of Black Protest II: Movement in the Doldrums
SEE CORRECTION People who are not Black activists often believe that the Black movement went away after the late 1960s, either because it won or because people just gave up. And the available data certainly shows a steep decline in Black protest events as covered by the New York Times.
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News Coverage of Black Protests I: Stories, not Episodes
In studying protest events using news sources, it is important to recognize the non-equivalence of events and articles about events. Social movement researchers usually code information about protest events in news sources with the goal of drawing conclusions about the frequency and size of the actual physical events that led
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