Hope For Social Change Research Articles

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

Native American identity work in settler colonial context

In U.S. society, Native Americans face invisibility, stereotypes, discrimination, and structural barriers. In this article, we employ a symbolic interactionist approach, embedded in critical analysis, to explore how this social context impacts the conveyance and interpretation of Native American identity among people who are not Native American. Participants, 213 White American and 104 Native American people, replied to open-ended questions about Native American identity conveyance and interpretation. We employed an inductive thematic approach to analyze their written replies. The majority of Native American participants discussed their identity in the context of limited public knowledge of, and/or oppression faced by, Native Americans. For most Native American participants, this context generated strain and struggle associated with conveyance and interpretation of their identities. Despite this, some Native American participants engaged in identity work to educate others and reduce oppression. Without prompting, some White participants expressed positive attitudes toward Native Americans and their identity revelation. These positive attitudes evidence both hope for social change and problematic fetishization based on romantic stereotypes of Native Americans. We argue that society-wide change is necessary to reduce strain in, and enhance the effectiveness of, identity work by Native American people.

Breaking the mold: Working through our differences to vocalize the sound of change

AbstractThis paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalize the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris's appointment as the first woman, woman of color, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organize and mobilize individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognizing our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfill our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mold in the form of multi‐layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.

Yes we can? Group efficacy beliefs predict collective action, but only when hope is high

Surprisingly, hope is under-researched in contemporary social-psychological explanations of collective action and social change. This may be because collective action research typically focuses on “high-hope” contexts in which it is generally assumed that change is possible (the main appraisal of hope), and thus the main question is whether “we” can change the situation through collective action (i.e., group efficacy beliefs). This line of thought implies that such beliefs should only motivate collective action when hope is high. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments in contexts that were not “high-hope”. In Study 1, conducted within the “low-hope” context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we found that manipulated group efficacy beliefs did not increase individuals' collective action intentions. Studies 2 and 3 used the contexts of NHS privatization in the United Kingdom and Gun Control Reform in the United States — contexts that were neither “low-hope” nor “high-hope”, which enabled us to manipulate hope and group efficacy beliefs together in one design. Consistent with our hypothesis, findings of both experiments revealed that group efficacy beliefs only predicted collective action when hope was high. Replicating Study 1, when hope was low, group efficacy had no effect on collective action intentions. We discuss our findings in light of the idea that only when hope for social change is established, the question of whether “we” can create change through collective action becomes relevant. Without hope, there can be no basis for agency, which informs goal-directed action.

From Socialism to Hedge Fund: The Human Element and the New History of Capitalism

Alfred Winslow Jones was a socialist who founded the first hedge fund in 1949. He had been U.S. Vice Consul in Berlin from 1931 to 1932, Soviet sympathizer and anti-Nazi spy with dissident German communists, humanitarian observer during the Spanish Civil War, acclaimed sociologist of class, and an editor for Fortune magazine. At every stage of his life, Jones occupied positions of advantage, and his invention of the modern hedge fund has had an outsized impact on global capitalism’s contemporary round of financialization. On its face, then, his life would appear to offer ideal material for a “great-man” biography. Yet this “great man” also wrestled with the continual recognition that structural forces were undermining his fondest hopes for social change. Following Georgi Derluguian, Giovanni Arrighi, and Marc Bloch, this article proposes a world-system biography of Jones as a method better suited for mapping the internal dialectics of twentieth-century capitalism, using Jones as a human connection between cyclical and structural transformations of capitalism, and across changes of phase from financial to material expansion—and back again. On another level, it suggests a theoretical reorientation—toward what Bloch called “the human element”—for studies of capitalism’s cultural and material history. It argues that such a reorientation would hold rewards for the “new history of capitalism” field, which until now has pursued its quarry primarily by tracing the movements of commodities, capital, institutions, and ideas.

Indignation, Inspiration, and Interaction on the Internet: Emotion Work Online in the Anti-Human Trafficking Movement

Despite the absence of face-to-face interactions, the web offers digital activists a surprisingly rich setting for emotion work, facilitating evocative storytelling and offering easy and immediate opportunities to engage in symbolic action. This article uses data from interviews with activists to analyze how emotion work is done online, including personalizing statistics to generate moral shock and telling survivor stories to demonstrate efficacy and create hope for social change. Furthermore, it argues that the web, especially social media, facilitates interactions between activists, state actors, and end users that provide mutual affirmation and validation. A positive unintended emotional consequence of such interactions is that activists working in the field draw encouragement and motivation from users at home.

Latino Demographic Growth: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow?

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City. By Mike Davis. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 172 pages. $19.00 (cloth). Mike Davis's articles and books have generated a consistent share of both enthusiasts and detractors. Davis's polemical second effort, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,received widespread acclaim as it urged us to look at Los Angeles from a vantage point that the L.A.-boosters had traditionally masked. 1 With a keen blend of literatures and disciplinary viewpoints, City of Quartz challenges and exposes the underbellies of the political, social, and economic heavyweights that groomed the image and shape of Los Angeles. Davis's "bestseller," Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, sparked harsh reactions about the author's source materials from readers at the opposite end of his progressive ideological location. 2 Whereas Ecology of Fear makes striking arguments about the interrelation of Southern California's natural and social disasters with the severe inequality embedded in Los Angeles's municipal planning, many of Davis's critics disengaged from his most important arguments to focus on the verity of his anecdotes and relatively trivial errors in fact-checking. Amidst this controversy, Ecology of Fear provides a unique combination of ecological and socio-political history, which [End Page 129] concludes that many of the social and political forces guiding Los Angeles have made its natural disasters more fatal. Davis's first text, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, faintly hinted at the emerging importance of Latinos in U.S. cities, perhaps creating an impetus for his latest effort. Davis retells the history of the U.S. working class as one mired in ethnic and racial division across two centuries, ultimately preventing the emergence of an unhindered U.S. left. 3 In discussing the internal and external limits to organized labor in the U.S., Davis addresses how the social and political structures of nativism and racism have historically divided U.S. workers and buttressed the power of capital. At the end of Prisoners of the American Dream, Davis invests his hope for social change in the United States in organizing the black working class, and with some hesitation, Latino workers as well. Davis writes, "My thesis is that, if there is to be any popular left in the 1990s, it will develop in the first instance through the mobilization of the radical political propensities in the Black--and, perhaps, Hispanic--working classes" (311, emphasis added). Perhaps. . . hmmm? Placing this tentativeness aside, a comprehensive discussion of the historical significance of Latinos does not emerge in Davis's later work centering on Los Angeles--where Latinos have been forecast to be the largest ethnic/racial population for decades. As such, with Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City, Davis provides a response to the critique that his previous musings on Los Angeles have given short shrift to the Latino contributions to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río Porciúncula--that is, the city of Los Angeles. Any book about Los Angeles--historical or otherwise--needs Latinos. And more broadly speaking, as Davis now argues in Magical Urbanism, Latinos belong "in the center of debate about the future of the American city" (9). Latino contributions to urban centers, often fueled by migration and the global relations between the U.S. and Latin America, range from the revitalization of neighborhoods and local economies to a sense of displacement by previous non-Latino as well as Latino residents. According to Davis, "Latinos are bringing redemptive energies to the neglected, worn-out cores and inner suburbs of many metropolitan areas" (51). Magical Urbanism, then,is a sweeping meditation on the social, political, and geographic impact that Latinos bring to urban spaces and imaginaries. Davis's exploration pivots on the notion that [End Page 130] Latinos are unique...