Section Officers

2002-2003

                                               

Chair

Hank Johnston (03)

San Diego State University

 

Chair-elect

David S. Meyer (03)

University of California, Irvine

 

Past Chair

Joane Nagel

University of Kansas

 

Secretary-Treasurer

Dan Myers (04)

University of Notre Dame

 

Council

Josh Gamson (03)

Jack Goldstone (05)

Holly McCammon (05)

Kelly Moore (04)

Francesca Polleta (03)

Rhys H. Williams (04)

 

Committees

Nominations

Mary Bernstein (04)

Sarah Soule (03)

Steve Valocchi (05)

 

Publications

Rob Benford (03)

Shirley Jackson (05)

Nella Van Dyke (04)

 

Workshops:

Jeff Goodwin (04)

Ann Mische (03)

Dingxin Zhao (05)

 

Webmaster

Alan Schussman (05)

 

Newsletter Editor

Kathleen E. Hull (05)

E-mail: hull@umn.edu

 

 

Report from the 2002 CBSM Section Workshop:

“Authority in Contention: Interdisciplinary Approaches”

 

      The section’s 2002 mini-conference/workshop on “Authority in Contention” took place on August 14 and 15 at Notre Dame University, in South Bend, Indiana.  Members of the conference organizing committee provide summaries of the plenary sessions below.

 

Plenary Session I – Authority in Contention: An Overview

 

      The Authority in Contention workshop kicked off with a provocative session that provided an overview of the workshop theme.  David Snow fired the opening shots in his paper, “Social Movements as Challenges to Authority: Resistance to an Emerging Conceptual Hegemony.”  Snow argued that reformulating the study of social movements under the rubric “contentious politics” privileged state institutions and omitted or downplayed the role of other arenas of contention.  While not being the first to make this claim, Snow extended this critique by arguing for a reformulation of social movements as collective challenges to systems of authority.  More specifically, social movements should be conceptualized as “collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity primarily outside of institutional channels for the purpose of challenging extant systems of authority, or resisting changes in such systems, in the group, organization, society, or world order of which they are a part.”  This definition does not omit the study of contentious politics, but rather, broadens the conceptualization to include challenges beyond the government and the state. 

(Cont’d on page 2)

 

      Snow argued that the benefits of this framework move beyond extending the scope of social movements from insurgent/state interaction.  It enables us to see if the conditions and mechanisms thought to account for the emergence of contentious politics hold more broadly to other areas, or if other frameworks are needed to account for emergence.  Second, it allows us to see if there is variation in the standard repertoires of contention found in state-focused activity.  It is reasonable to assume that different tactics may operate in different contexts, but this notion is not likely to be investigated in the narrower conceptualization.  Third, it enables us to develop a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes authority.  This concept is not only central to understanding social movements, but authority is also a central concern of sociology more broadly, thus linking our undertaking more centrally to disciplinary concerns.

      Myra Marx Ferree developed the theme of expanding our notions of authority structures by discussing the dynamic of repression in her paper, “Soft Repression: Ridicule, Stigma, and Silencing in Gender-based Movements.”  Ferree argued that the concept of repression is bound up in a state-centered view of social movements and raised the issue of whether repression was still a useful concept in a broader social movement landscape.  Her response is the concept of “soft repression” as “a consciously gendered image of the forms that repression frequently takes in civil society, in contrast to the more conventional, male-gendered imagery of hard repression in which states typically engage.”  Where hard repression involves the use of force to crush opposition, soft repression involves the use of nonviolent means to silence or eradicate oppositional ideas. 

      Ferree discussed three forms that soft repression can take.  Micro-level ridicule directed at individuals and groups functions to diminish and discredit challenges to cultural meanings.  Examples abound, from “femi-nazis,” “tree-huggers,” to “peaceniks,” and “politically correct.” Meso-level stigma is an attempt to impair the collective identity of groups as a means of discrediting and devaluing them.  Examples include the devaluation of affirmative action and the resistance of women to identifying themselves as feminists.  Macro-level silencing concerns system-level processes that act to block voices from being heard.  For example, media notions about what issues and voices deserve coverage are one form of silencing.  Taken together, these three forms of soft repression emphasize activities occurring outside of the state domain that attempt to inhibit the development of social movement activity.

      Francesca Polletta’s paper, “Authority in Movements,” drew on the authority structures framework as an impetus to re-think how we use culture to understand social movements.  Conceptualizing social movements as challenges to authority structures puts culture front and center for at least two reasons.  First, it points to how movements question, challenge, and redefine authority.   Second, it sensitizes us to the multiple structures of authority that are related not only structurally, but culturally.  But current applications of culture, Polletta argued, are inadequate to address these issues.  Thinking of culture in terms of conceptual oppositions limits seeing how culture infuses structure, politics, and strategy. 

      Polletta proposes a conceptualization of culture that “allows us to trace how it interacts with structures and resources, the conditions in which it has an independent force, and a conception of culture that allows us to discern the mechanisms by which it makes some stories tellable, some tactics appropriate, some kinds of discussion legitimate…”  Polletta then reformulates culture away from ideals and beliefs and instead examines culture as schemas and rules and the institutional contexts that privilege some schemas over others.  This approach can be used to shed new light on central questions such as movement emergence, movement impacts, and strategy.

  – Dan Cress

 

Plenary Session II – Authority in Contention: Exemplars

 

      In the second plenary session, three sets of authors presented exemplar studies of different ways that authority is involved in social movement activity.  First, Benita Roth discussed the challenges of feminist activism in extra-feminist settings.  She described such challenges in terms of two axes of differentiation: feminist activism in institutionalized vs. non-institutionalized (i.e., social movement) settings; and in feminist-friendly vs. non-friendly settings.  In this way, she explored how feminist activism interacts with different forms of institutional authority as well as with cultural legitimation of the movement.  For example, feminist activism in unfriendly, highly institutionalized settings, like the Catholic Church and the military, has tended to lead to marginalization of feminist concerns (with some exceptions).  In contrast, feminist concerns within friendlier institutionalized settings, as shown in Hester Eisenstein’s study of Australian “femocrats,” tend to fade over time with bureaucratization and distance from grass roots organizing.  In less institutionalized social movement settings that are hostile to feminist concerns, lower exit costs can lead to explicitly feminist organizing, as demonstrated by women in New Left, Black Power and Latino movements.  In contrast, activists in feminist-friendly social movement settings face the danger of the compartmentalization of their concerns into constricted “Women’s Caucuses,” as happened within anti-AIDS movement.  Roth’s typology shows us how institutional and cultural authority of different types provide characteristic restrictions on (as well as openings for) different kinds of social movement activity. 

      Second, Sharon Erickson Neptstad presented a paper on multiple authority challenges posed by the Plowshares Movement, a movement of Catholic lay and religious activists who sabotaged military installments in opposition to the nuclear arms race.  She argues that the tactical choices as well as the moral and religious values expressed by the movement challenged not only the authority of the state and the military, but also of the Catholic Church itself.  Acting in the tradition of previous Catholic left social justice and anti-war organizing, the Plowshares movement justified their action through a reinterpretation of the gospels that characterized Jesus as a criminal who defied stated authority and confronted institutions that oppressed the poor.  In doing so, the movement challenged church authority on several fronts.  On the level of values, the movement questioned the Church’s just war doctrine as well as its conventional acquiescence to state policies.  Perhaps more strikingly, the movement also challenged the Church’s interpretive methodology, whereby church doctrine is handed down from the hierarchy to be applied deductively to particular social circumstances.  In contrast, the movement envisioned a more bottom-up process in which all Church participants engage in the hermeneutic work of reflection on how Church teachings apply to surrounding conditions.  While the movement may not have succeeded in its challenges to state authority, Nepstad argues that perhaps the greater impact of the movement lay in the “spillover challenges” it posed to both the teachings and the methodology of the Catholic Church.

      The final paper, by Barbara Fick and Ada Verloren, examined the role of trade unions in creating a democratic society.  Like Neptstad, they are interested in the “spillover” challenges posed by movements, in this case the challenges to the state authority posed by movements targeting economic power.  They argue that independent trade unions not only engage in contention over workplace issues, but have also played an important role in movements for democratization in places such as Poland, Bosnia, and South Africa.  Because of their independence in relation to state authority as well as their relatively democratic governing structure, trade unions can serve as countervailing power centers that play a mediating role between worker-citizens and governing authority.  They discussed in particular the role of South African trade unions, which under the apartheid system used labor action such as “militant abstentionism” to create awareness of inequalities both within the structure of government as well as in the economy.  With the end of apartheid, the South African labor movement has had to rethink its strategy in order to balance participation in governmental and economic power structures with more extra-institutional forms of action.  Like the previous two papers, the Fick and Verloren paper examines challenges to authority on multiple fronts – in this case, economic and political – as well as how these challenges differ when carried out inside and outside of institutional structures.

 – Ann Mische

 

Plenary Session III – Rethinking State Authority

 

      The workshop concluded with a plenary session called "Rethinking State Authority."  Jennifer Earl and Jenny Irons each presented papers that called for a broader conceptualization of state repression or coercion.  Earl's more theoretical paper discussed the myriad forms of "social control" of protest exerted by both state and non-state actors, while Irons' more empirical paper analyzed the ways in which state-sanctioned bodies monitored racial boundaries during the Civil Rights era.  These and other papers presented at the workshop challenged participants to conceptualize not only protest or contention, but also state authority and/or repression in much broader ways.  The discussant for this plenary, Jeff Goodwin, suggested that movement organizations themselves typically attempt to control and channel protest in various ways. 

      The final speaker at the workshop was Doug McAdam, who outlined the approach toward "contentious politics" which he, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly present in their recent book, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001).  McAdam took issue with David Snow's claim that they had conceptualized contentious politics too narrowly by requiring that the state be a party to such contention.  McAdam suggested that this definition was adopted pragmatically, since there was neither the time nor space to analyze adequately contention that did not involve the state.  But McAdam suggested that their approach would in fact be helpful for understanding contention involving other types of authorities.  Where this approach might prove less useful, McAdam suggested, would be in analyzing contention over lifestyles and other more purely cultural concerns, which did not directly involve institutional authorities of any type.  Much of the ensuing discussion concerned whether or not, and to what extent, the perspective on contentious politics advocated in Dynamics of Contention discouraged exploration of certain types of movements or movement activities, especially those which do not entail contention with state or other authorities.

 – Jeff Goodwin

 

 

 

ASA 2003 Annual Meeting Preview

 

      It’s not too soon to begin thinking about August in Atlanta!  Papers are due January 15 and must be submitted via ASA’s online submission service.  (Visit www.asanet.org for details.)  Our section is sponsoring five sessions at the 2003 Annual Meeting:

 

Ø      Globalization, Protest, and Transnational Mobilization – Dana Fisher, Columbia University  

 

Ø      Virtual Culture: The Internet and Social Movement Mobilization – Guobin Yang, University of Hawaii, Honolulu

 

Ø      Culture and Social Movements: Framing, Identity, and Diffusion Processes – John A. Noakes, University of Pennsylvania

 

Ø      Social Movements and Law (co-sponsored with Section on Sociology of Law) – Anna-Maria Marshall, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Kathleen Hull, University of Minnesota

 

Ø      Refereed Roundtables – Yang Su, University of California, Irvine

The Biographical Turn in French Social Movement Research

 

Erik Neveu, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Rennes)

 

(This essay was adapted from “Trend Report: The Contentious French” Mobilization 7(3): 325-334.)

 

      Anglophone scholars often miss the important contributions to social movement studies by French researchers. This is espe­cially true since the early nineties when numerous books and articles presented findings that are highly relevant to the inter­national community of social movement scholars. There are a variety of methods, topics, and approaches in this literature that challenge efforts to synthesize. This brief essay – adapted from an article forthcoming in Mobilization – focuses on just one of four trends discussed in the longer piece: a biographical turn among French researchers, a shift toward the subjective and “micro” dimensions of ideologies, life stories, and lived experi­ences.

      Most French case studies, especially the most re­cent ones, combine an emphasis on objective structural data and attention to the subjective and “micro” dimensions of ideologies, life-stories, and lived experiences. Rational choice theories never gained serious influence in French political science, and the very small number of French social scientists with interna­tional recognition in quantitative data analysis has been both a national weakness and a real shield against number-crunching objectivism. Indeed, leading French sociologists (especially Bourdieu) have developed a theoretical framework whose goal is precisely to go beyond the old and sterile oppositions between structure and agency, individuals and society, freedom and de­terminism. The same remark can be applied to the foreign soci­ologists who have worked in French academia since the seven­ties. Despite their differences, Weber, Elias, and symbolic inter­actionists pay attention to “comprehensive” sociology—to the meanings invested in actions. It is worth adding that the use of indi­vidual and collective biographies is deeply rooted in French historical and sociological research. This dimension is highly visible in some recent research whose common theme is a valuation of biographical approaches (or le tournant prosopog­raphique) centered on the careers of generations of activists. The Revue Française de Science Politique dedicated a special issue (2001) to a collection of case studies of militant careers, and contained a stimulating theoretical text by Fillieule that devel­oped a framework for a “processual approach of individual commitments.” The illuminating power of such analysis is illus­trated in Pascal Dauvin and Johanna Simeant’s exciting book on the organizations of French doctors (2002), which offers both a kind of sociological encyclopedia for analyzing “humanitarian” organizations and an outstanding case study of the biographical roots and the complex balance of the moral and material incentives and rewards of these commitments.

 

 

      A similar approach to social movement commitments as moments in political and professional trajectories of individu­als, generations, and groups is also visible in a book by Annie Collovald and her coauthors about third-world solidarity move­ments that are organized in the workplace (2002). The book’s final chapter is one of the most exciting texts available on the current changes in activism. Collovald and her co-authors’ theo­retical approach is to interpret the rise of “solidarity activism” as a provisional stage in three families of biographies, correspond­ing to three clearly different emotional and intellectual invest­ments in activism. The first refers to members of the old genera­tion of left-wing trade-unionists; the second to younger workers celebrating autonomy, supporting the new policies of human engineering, and their companies’ entrepreneurial values, whose activism and commitment are tuned to these values. The third family represents young, mostly female workers who search for ontological reassurance to face the frustrations of job insecurity or blurred professional identities.

      Collovald and her coauthors also directly challenge Ion’s thesis of the “new” style of militant commitments as mir­roring a powerful trend toward individualism (1997, 2001). While oversimpli­fying an intense and complex debate, their criticisms can be summarized into three arguments.  The first is that current research on activism tends to over-rate the importance of trends in the life of “associations” dedicated to charity, leisure, and humanitarian causes, while underestimating other kinds of SMOs. The case of activist workers from EDF (the French state company producing and distributing electric­ity) using most of their holidays—in very Spartan situations—to work full-time to equip small Moroccan or African villages with second-hand electrical generators shows that if Ion’s brand of pragmatic and temporary commitment does exist (he calls it “post-it commitment”), stronger forms are not simple remnants of the Third International. A second criticism argues that the oppo­sition between old and new activism is based on an oversimpli­fied vision of the working-class-centered activism of yesterday, thus confusing the myths of these social movements and the lived experience of rank-and-file participants and forgetting that its forms were not freely chosen but responses to domination and objective relationships of power. But the core argument of the debate claims that one cannot “explain commitment by commitment,” but must think of its changes in a system of social inter-dependencies that values notions such as “moral career,” changes in collective identities, reinterpreting changes in the history of groups, trade unions, and workforce management policies. The debate opened by the books of Jacques Ion and Annie Collovald is deeply rooted in the flesh of contemporary French social movement scholarship, and will help make sense of activism and offer stimulating reflections to any scholar of social movements.

 

Collovald, Annie, Marie-Helène Lechien, Sabine Rozier, Laurent Willemez. 2002. L’humanitaire ou le management des dévouements. Enquête sur le militantisme de solidarité internationale en faveur du Tiers Monde. Rennes : PUR.

Dauvin, Pascal, and Johanna Siméant. 2002. Le travail humani­taire. Les acteurs des ONG, du siège au terrain. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Ion, Jacques. 1997. La fin des militants. Paris: Editions de l’atelier

__________. 2001. L’engagement au pluriel. Saint Etienne Presses de l’Université de Saint Etienne.

Revue Française de Science Politique. 2001. Devenirs Militants, 51(1-2).

 

 

Reflections on the Future of Sociology: Is Specialization Impeding the Production of Useful Knowledge?

 

Bernard Phillips

bernieflps@aol.com

 

      I wonder whether what we need today in our discipline – perhaps more urgently than ever before – is a movement that will address the problems we now face, such as how to integrate the broad knowledge within the discipline and how to apply that knowledge to gain understanding of pressing problems, such as accelerating possibilities for mass annihilation with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorist or governmental groups.

      Over the past three years I've been attempting to develop a scientific method that opens us up to enormous range of knowledge locked up within the compartmentalized fields of our discipline, granting that these efforts come to no more than the proverbial drop in the bucket.  In my just-published Beyond Sociology's Tower of Babel:  Reconstructing the Scientific Method (Aldine de Gruyter, 2001), I attempted to sketch and illustrate an approach that promises to build bridges connecting our specialized areas, developing an approach which I believe promises to yield the rapid cumulative development of knowledge within sociology and the social sciences. 

      Also, a group of sociologists and one philosopher of social science have joined forces in a volume, Toward A Sociological Imagination:  Bridging Specialized Fields (Univ. Press of America) that grew out of the first conference of the "Sociological Imagination Group" in 2000, an informal group which holds a research conference during the evenings of all annual ASA meetings.  If any reader attended the Sociological Imagination Group's open meetings during the evenings of the Chicago ASA meetings, she or he will understand more fully what our group is attempting.

      In my own view the discipline lacks a growing movement for determining how to achieve the rapid cumulative development of knowledge.  Such a movement could yield the basis in knowledge for confronting what I see as rapidly accelerating social problems like terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.  And that knowledge could also help us to envision how to move, pragmatically, toward vague ideals like "deep democracy."

 

Deadline for Spring 2003

Critical Mass Bulletin: March 1

 

New Publications by Section Members

 

Mertig, Angela G. and Riley E. Dunlap.  2001.  “Environmentalism, New Social Movements and the New Class:  A Cross-National Investigation.” Rural Sociology 66: 113-136.

 

Dunlap, Riley E., Chenyang Xiao and Aaron M. McCright.  2001.  “Politics and Environment in America: Partisan and Ideological Cleavages in Public Support for Environmentalism.”  Environmental Politics 10:  23-48.

 

Mertig, Angela G. and Riley E. Dunlap.  2001.  “Environmentalism:  Preservation and Conservation.”  Pp. 4687-4693 in N. J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Vol 7.  New York: Elsevier Science.

 

Mertig, Angela G., Riley E. Dunlap and Denton E. Morrison.  2002. “The Environmental Movement in the United States.”  Pp. 448-481 in R.E. Dunlap and W. Michelson (eds.), Handbook of Environmental Sociology.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press.

 

Binder, Amy.  2002.  Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools.  Princeton University Press.

 

Benford, Robert D. 2002. "Controlling Narratives and Narratives as Social Control within Social Movements." Pp. 53-75 in Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements, edited by Joseph E. Davis. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

 

Benford, Robert D. and Scott A. Hunt. 2003. "Interactional Dynamics in Public Problems Marketplaces: Movements and the Counterframing and Reframing of Public Problems." Forthcoming in Gale Miller and James Holstein (eds.), Constructionist Challenges: Directions for Social Problems Theory, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

 

Smith, Jackie, and Hank Johnston. 2002. Globalization and Resistance.  Lanham (MD): Rowman and Littlefield.

 

Also, please note that the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography published a thematic issue on GENDER AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS in June 2002 (Vol. 31:3).

 

Section Happenings

 

 

2002 Election Results

 

Chair-Elect: David S. Meyer

Council: Jack Goldstone, Holly McCammon

Publications Committee: Shirley Jackson

Nominations Committee: Steve Valocchi

Workshop Committee: Dingxin Zhao

 

Congratulations!

 

 

2002 Section Award Recipients

 

Distinguished Book Awards

 

Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out:  States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991.

 

and

 

Dingxin Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen:  State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement.

 

Best Published Article:

 

Steven Pfaff and Guobin Yang, “Double-Edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action:  Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989.” Theory and Society, 2001.

 

Honorable Mention:

 

Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher, “Media and Mobilization:  The Case of  Radio and Southern Textile Worker Insurgency, 1929-1934.” American Sociological Review, 2001.

 

Outstanding Student Paper

 

Deana A. Rohlinger, “Movement-Countermovement Dynamics in the Abortion

Debate: An Examination of Media Coverage Outcome.”

 

 

 

Call for Nominations: Section Offices and Committees

 

      The Section on Collective Behavior & Social Movements is looking for a few good colleagues to serve as CBSM section Chair Elect, on CBSM Council, and on three CBSM committees:  Workshop Committee, Publications Committee, and Nominations Committee.  If you or a colleague would like to be considered for nomination for one of these positions, please contact Joane Nagel (nagel@ku.edu), CBSM Nominations Committee Chair, with the name, institutional affiliation, contact information including email address, and a brief biosketch or attached vita by December 1, 2002. 

Calls for Papers and Course Materials

 

ASA Syllabus Guide for Collective Behavior and Social Movements

      We are requesting the submission of materials to be considered for the new ASA Syllabus Guide for CBSM.  The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2003.  The new edition should be available at the ASA Meetings in August 2003.

      Specifically we would like to receive syllabi for entire courses (semester or quarter) as well as curricular materials. We are seeking syllabi suitable for all levels of all levels of post-secondary instruction: lower division undergraduate, upper division undergraduate, introductory level graduate courses, and advanced graduate seminars. We ask that those submitting materials make quite clear the type of institution and level of course for which their syllabus was developed.  

      Syllabi for entire courses. We seek syllabi for semester or quarter length courses.  Specifically, we seek three types of syllabi: 1) for general courses on social movements; 2) for courses that focus exclusively on one or more particular movements (environmental, women=s global justice, health, etc.).  We are also interested in syllabi for social movements courses with a service-learning, internship, volunteering or some other type of field placement component.

      Instructional modules.  Often instructors would like to integrate some treatment of social movements or collective behavior into other courses.  We are interested in receiving materials suitable for instructional units of 1 to 5 weeks in length. These could focus on a specific social movement – environmental, global justice, etc. – or counter movement.  They could focus on a particular aspect of social movements – framing, participation, impact, collective identity, organizations, etc.

      Instructional materials.  People who teach courses in social movements or who wish to add a related unit to an existing course often have difficulty locating appropriate supplementary materials.  Thus, we are seeking listings of videos, novels, music and other supplementary materials that work well in teaching courses.  We ask that suggestions be briefly annotated and that the submission include a brief description of how the material is used. 

      Submit two hard copies and electronically in Word Perfect or MS Word. Also, include your institutional and departmental affiliations and clearly indicate the instructional level for which the course has been designed: high school, lower division undergraduate, upper division undergraduate, introductory graduate, or advanced seminar.  

            Send material to either Bob Edwards (EdwardsR@mail.ecu.edu) or Marieke Van Willigen (VanWilligenM@mail.ecu.edu), Department of Sociology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 27858. Phone: 252.328.6883.

 

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS: WORK AND OCCUPATIONS

      Work and Occupations invites you to submit your manuscripts for peer review and possible publication.  Now in its 29th volume, WO is a scholarly, sociological quarterly that publishes original research in the sociology of work, employment, labor, and social inequality in the workplace, labor market, and labor force.  Consult the latest issue of WO for manuscript formatting and submission instructions. Manuscripts will not be returned.  Send three copies of your paper to: Daniel B. Cornfield, Editor, Work and Occupations, Box 1811, Station B, Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235.  E-mail inquiries may be directed to the Editor at this address: daniel.b.cornfield@vanderbilt.edu.

 

CURRICULUM GUIDE ON TEACHING THE SOCIOLOGY OF PEACE, WAR & SOCIAL CONFLICT, 3RD EDITION

      We invite submissions for the third edition of this curriculum guide, to be published by the Teaching Resource Center, American Sociological Association.  We welcome submissions from sociologists in diverse fields.

      The third edition of the curriculum guide will consist of three sections: I. Syllabi and other instructional materials;  II. Essays on best practices for teaching;  III. Bibliographies and lists of websites.  Deadline for sibmissions is December 10, 2002.

      Please send both a hard copy and a 3.5 inch diskette or e-mail attachment.  Send in Microsoft Word format, readable for an IBM computer.  Materials are expected to be already checked for spelling and grammar.  Margins should be one inch, top and bottom, left and right.  Accepted materials may require editorial modification.  Single-spacing preferred for syllabi/course materials and bibliographies, double-spacing for essays.  Use double-spacing between paragraphs, and between sections and sub-sections.

      Please send specific materials to the following: Section I (syllabi and other course materials) to John MacDougall, Ph.D, Dept. of Regional Economic & Social Development, 500E O’Leary Library, 61 Wilder St., University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA 08154, e-mail: John_MacDougall@uml.edu.          Sections II and III (essays, bibliographies, websites) to Morten G. Ender, Ph.D., Dept. of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, Thayer Hall, Room 282E, United States Military Academy, West Point NY 10996, e-mail: morten-ender@usma.edu.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN HEALTH

      Outline proposals for contributions are invited for the tenth monograph in the series published by Sociology of Health and Illness, in conjunction with Blackwell Publishers, in the year 2004. The monograph aims to bring together the fields of social movements and medical sociology in a collection that is both theoretically informed and research based.  Possible areas for contributions are:

      1) Social movement effects on access to the health care system and to specific services

      2) Social movements and the social discovery of illness

      3) Illness experience and advocacy movements

      4) Citizen participation in creating scientific knowledge

      5) Social movement theory and health social movements.

      Potential contributors should send an outline proposal for papers (up to 800 words) to co-Editor of the monograph, Phil Brown, Department of Sociology, Brown University, Providence RI 02912 by November 30th 2002. Email submission is encouraged (phil_brown@brown,edu) and all eventual paper submissions must also be in electronic form. International contributions are particularly encouraged. The monograph will appear both as a regular issue of the journal and in book form.

      All proposals will be reviewed and notifications of the outcome will be given by 14th January 2003. Those invited to contribute to the monograph will be asked to submit articles of between 6,000-7,000 words by July 1st 2003, following the journal’s stylistic guidelines, so that they can be refereed in the usual way. It is planned to publish the monograph in September 2004.

CALL FOR PAPERS: MANCHESTER SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE

      Between 1995 and 2002 Manchester Metropolitan University hosted eight very successful international conferences on “ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST.”  A Ninth conference will be held

from  22nd-24th April 2003.

      The Conference aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their leaders and supporters andwhich contribute to shaping their fate.

      Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 40 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography.  The Manchester conferences have been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.

      Call for Papers: We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes.  Papers should address such matters as:

* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests

* social movement theory

* utopias and experiments

* ideologies of collective action

To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract: EITHER Colin Barker, Dept. of Sociology OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West, Manchester M15 6LL, England, email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk  Tel: M. Tyldesley  0161 247 3460, email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk, Fax: 0161 247 6321 (+44 161 247 6321).  (Wherever possible, please use email.)

      Conference Papers: Those giving papers are asked to supply them in advance, for inclusion in the bound volumes of papers which will be available from the conference opening.

* Either provide two single-spaced copies, on A4 or US Letter paper, with one inch margins, and with a copy of the text on a DOS disk in MS Word format (if in doubt, please contact one of the convenors in advance), or send the paper to Colin Barker as an email attachment in Word.

* Word limit 7,000 words (including notes etc.)

* Final date for receipt of abstracts: 24 March 2003.

* Final date for receipt of papers: 31 March 2003.

* Participants who do not supply their papers by the final date are asked to bring 50 copies to the Conference for distribution.  Advance submission is much preferred, since the bound volumes of papers are sent to the British Library but loose papers are excluded.

      Conference Arrangements and Costs: The conference will run from lunch-time Tuesday 22nd to lunch-time Thursday 24th April 2003.  Cost, inclusive of three lunches, teas/coffees and copies of the bound Proceedings, will be £105 (students £65).  Bed and Breakfast accommodation will be available at nearby UMIST, either in student bedrooms at £35 per night or in ensuite rooms at £49 per night.  Conference participants will be invited to dine together at two local (and not too expensive) restaurants on the two conference evenings.

 

Job Announcement

 

Duquesne University. The Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy invites applications for one full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor position. We seek candidates who have expertise in areas of conflict resolution and peace studies. The position will begin in August 2003. The Graduate Center is a Master's degree program with 16 faculty in Social and Public Policy, Political Science, and Sociology. We offer two tracks of study: conflict resolution/ peace studies and policy analysis. We seek candidates who will enhance our program through an active research agenda and innovative graduate teaching. We are particularly interested in candidates with skills that promote Duquesne University's emphasis on ethics, leadership and community outreach. Salary is competitive and commensurate with qualifications. The review process will begin October 15 and continue until the position is filled. Applicants should submit a letter of intent, curriculum vitae, samples of scholarly work, teaching evaluations and names of three references. Send to: Policy Center Search Committee, Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy, 550A College Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA 15282.

 

Last Chance to Receive Volume 7

 

 

Volume 7 Number 1    A special issue on comparative environmental campaigns, edited by Donatella della Porta and Dieter Rucht

 

Volume 7, Number 2  Six cutting-edge articles about emotions in contentious politics, edited by Ron Aminzade and Doug McAdam

 

Volume 7, Number 3  Published in October

·          McCammon and Campbell on Coalition Formation between Suffragists and WTCU

·          Einwohner on Opponents’ Claims and Collective Identity Construction

·          Scalmer on The Labor of Repertoire Diffusion

·          Westby on Strategic Action, Ideology, and Frames

·          Carmin and Hicks on Transnational Triggering in Czech and Polish Environmentalism

·          Neveu on Trends in French Social Movement Research

·          Dan Myers edits Mobilizations Book Review Section

 

Subscriptions cost  $39.50 in the US, $49.50 outside the US (for air mail delivery). You can safely subscribe by e-mail to the editor, Hank.Johnston@sdsu.edu, using a credit card (Visa, MasterCard or Amex). Please supply card number, expiration date and mailing address. Or you may fax a credit card order using the form below to 858 673 8402. To pay by check in US dollars, mail  the form below  to Mobilization, Department of Sociology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA  92182-4423.

 

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