Social Change Efforts Research Articles

“Bridging the Gap”: Difference, Dialogue, and Community Organizing

The purpose of this study is to understand a citywide initiative to increase diversity and inclusion in a predominantly white US city with a tragic racial history. This research reveals prevailing struggles with communicating about diversity and race and taking meaningful actions to promote social change. Using theories of difference and dialogue, we analyze in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with three voluntary organizations: The Chamber of Commerce; The Network; and Minorities in Business. Our work answers calls to center race and embodied differences and extends theorizing on dialogic sensibilities. The findings reveal that difference organizes dialogue through: (1) the ongoing construction of context; (2) the mobilizing of social change efforts; and (3) the intermingling of economic and racial justice discourses. Ultimately, we hope this work encourages further conversation about difference, race, and engaged scholarship.

No-Drop Prosecution in Domestic Violence Cases

The feminist debate on no-drop prosecution is long-standing. However, the ways liberal and radical feminist perspectives inform advocacy in applied settings are limited in the extant research. Drawing from interviews with 26 domestic violence (DV) victim advocates, the current study examines perspectives and practices of victim advocates in no-drop prosecution cases. Two predominate themes emerged-a survivor-defined approach to advocacy emphasizing the individual situations and choices of battered women, and a social change approach focusing on changing the social structures that tolerate violence against women. Findings indicated the relationship between such practices was complex, overlapping, and at times contradictory. While advocates generally supported no-drop prosecution with the goal of social change, survivor-defined approaches superseded social change efforts for a majority of advocates. Survivor-centered advocacy and no-drop prosecution at times conflicted with one another. Advocates described victims' concerns about safety, livelihood, and trauma testifying in court as challenges to the policy, as well as the practice of holding victims in contempt of court and jailing them for not testifying. At the same time, advocates illustrated how survivor-defined advocacy complimented prosecution by addressing women's myriad of needs and concerns related to prosecution. Advocates indicated that victims were more likely to safely participate in prosecution when their individual needs were addressed. Implications for DV victim advocacy are presented.

Reflecting on the Oppressor in the Mirror

Drawing extensively from personal experience, the author explores what it is like to experience patriarchy from the perspective of a person of privilege. He tracks his journey as a young white man coming to terms with the undue privilege that he is afforded on the basis of his race and gender. The article also explores the flaws the author finds in rigid identity politics that hinder collaboration, and attempts to illustrate how people lose and the system wins when activists engage in in‐fighting and cling tightly to narrow definitions of identity. Ultimately, the article makes the case for how shared humanity is a key component in making significant progress in social change efforts and in society as a whole.

The Perennial Nature of the Catholic Worker Farms: A Reconsideration of Failure

AbstractContemporary challenges in rural and environmental politics hinge on understanding what success and failure mean. One avenue of studying success and failure of political and social change efforts is to study social movements and intentional communities often equated with how many years such efforts persisted. The Catholic Worker movement's combination of a vision of radical social change, religion, nonviolence, hospitality, activism, and agrarianism involve publications, urban houses, and farms that constitute a movement and a network of autonomous intentional communities. The Catholic Worker movement's communal farms began in 1933 and at various points those efforts were deemed failures. Thus, the story of the Catholic Worker farms is one of impermanence and struggle for a desired ideal. However, what we are missing in condemning the farms to failure is the utter success since the 1970s of a strong agrarian and environmental strain of the Catholic Worker movement based on farm activity, activism, and cooperative economics. This study reconceptualizes failure in the language of process and context. The Catholic Worker farms case study refigures failure such that we can articulate a politics of possibility related to the dramatic challenges not only of society but also of the environment.

The Value of Youth Organizing

As a part of its collaboration with the Born This Way Foundation, the Berkman Center is publishing on this website a series of papers that synthesize existing peer-reviewed research or equivalent scholarship and provide research-grounded insight to the variety of stakeholders working on issues related to youth empowerment and action towards creating a kinder, braver world. This series, called the The Kinder & Braver World Project: Research Series (danah boyd, John Palfrey, and Dena Sacco, editors), is presented by the Born This Way Foundation & the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and supported by the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This set of papers involves topics related to the Role of Youth Organizations and Youth Movements for Social Change.Across the country, adolescents have become deeply involved in struggles for equity and social justice, as they work to promote a kinder, braver world. Although youth have long been leaders in social change efforts, today’s young people are increasingly supported in this work through youth organizing programs. This paper explains what youth organizing is, identifies four ways in which it benefits the young people involved, offers suggestions for mitigating any downsides of participation, and addresses barriers that youth organizing groups may face.

The Mediating Role of Social Support, Cognitive Appraisal, and Quality Health Care in Black Mothers’ Stress-Resilience Process Following Loss to Gun Violence

Although much attention has been granted to the perpetrators and victims of gun violence, limitations exist in our understanding of the psychological well-being of parents grieving children lost to gun violence. The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating effects of social support, cognitive appraisal, and quality health care on the relationship between traumatic stress and resilience among Black mothers bereaving children to gun violence. A cross-sectional design and network sampling method were used to recruit 48 Black mothers living in a large Canadian city. Participants completed a survey either by phone or in person. Social support and positive appraisal were found to be protective factors of resilience for study participants. The traumatic stress experienced by the sample decreased with increased social support (beta = -.291, p = .045), leading to an increase of their resilience (beta = .297, p = .032). With positive appraisal of the loss, the stress levels of study participants decreased (beta = -.334, p = .023), leading to increased resilience (beta = .441, p = .003). Quality health care showed a significant positive relationship with the resilience of the women (beta = .313, p = .023) but did not mediate the relationship between their stress and resilience. For Black mothers who experience loss of a child to gun violence, policy and social change efforts should focus on strengthening their access to formal and informal supports and improving their abilities to find meaning in their loss.

Coverage of social marketing efforts in the mainstream media

How well known is the field of social marketing? Given the recent rise to prominence of social media, could there be name confusion between “social marketing” and “social media marketing?” To what extent do people believe that social change efforts are coercive or reflect a “nanny state?” We use a content analysis of newspaper coverage as a measure of public opinion to assess these issues. To investigate how much coverage social marketing efforts receive and how these efforts are portrayed in the mainstream media, a content analysis of the 10 largest circulation newspapers in the USA was conducted. A search examined the term “social marketing.” The results show that there is generally very limited coverage of social marketing. In fact, the term “social marketing” is currently being used primarily to describe social media marketing efforts. The results also show that there is a considerable amount of criticism of social change efforts, especially those with structural or “upstream” efforts. Finally, the likelihood of criticism depends on the orientation of the newspaper (with the Chicago Sun‐Times and the New York Times more typically supportive and the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal more critical of these efforts).Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Race, Power and Social Action in Neighborhood Community Organizing: Reproducing and Resisting the Social Construction of the Other

Scholars argue in favor of social action in community organizing to address the oppression experienced by racialized groups. This study examines how community organizing practice in one diverse neighborhood constructed race to understand the potential for social action. Using interview and observational data with 16 community organizers working in 1 diverse, low-income neighborhood in Québec, Canada, I examine the social construction of race through the lens of postcolonial theory and the writings of Michel Foucault. I argue that a discourse of neutrality existed among community organizers, which was tied to state policy and a colonial discourse embedded therein. The resulting disconnect between race and power in community organizing practice not only forecloses on social change efforts, it also extends a state-driven nation-building agenda into community. As the basis for an anticolonial approach to neighborhood community organizing, I juxtapose the discourse of neutrality in community organizing with strategies that recoupled race and power by drawing attention to efforts among community organizers that were antagonistic to the discourse.

Pengaruh Paham Liberalisme dan Neoliberalisme Terhadap Pendidikan Islam di Indonesia

This paper is aimed at discussing the influence of liberalism dan neo-liberalism in Islamic Education in Indonesia. The existence of Islamic education is always dealing with and grappling with the reality surrounding them. The struggle between Islamic education to meet socio-cultural reality are two possibilities: a. Islamic education gives impact on socio-cultural environment; b. Islamic education is influenced by the reality of social change, by socio-cultural environment. The ideology of liberalism and neo-liberalism, rationalism, freedom, responsibility, fairness, and tolerance are ideals struggled by liberalism, despite the fact that some ideal values fail to realize. While neoliberalism is actually understood the existence of liberal capitalism is the ideology of liberalism that has led to the economic sector. The influence of not only the political, social, and economic, but in education as well which is a view that emphasizes the development of capabilities, to protect the rights and freedoms as well as identify problems and social change efforts in order to maintain stability for a long time. Central ideas of education revolves around the application of the concept of rationality, freedom, and equality. Education is a democratic distribution of rationality with a balanced treatment, between freedom and equality of rights and obligations, students. Teachers function as facilitators and change the learning process. Philosophycally running constructivism learning including the development of capitalization of education in the form of education commercialization. The fact also has affected in the world of Islamic education.

Shifting Power? Assessing the Impact of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives

SummaryAccountability and transparency initiatives have taken democratisation, governance, aid and development circles by storm since the turn of the century. Many actors involved with them – as donors, funders, programme managers, implementers and researchers – are now keen to know more about what these initiatives are achieving.This paper arises from a review of the impact and effectiveness of transparency and accountability initiatives which gathered and analysed existing evidence, discussed how it could be improved, and evaluated how impact and effectiveness could be enhanced. This paper takes the discussion further, by delving into what lies behind the methodological and evaluative debates currently surrounding governance and accountability work. It illustrates how choices about methods are made in the context of impact assessment designs driven by different objectives and different ideological and epistemological underpinnings. We argue that these differences are articulated as methodological debates, obscuring vital issues underlying accountability work, which are about power and politics, not methodological technicalities.In line with this argument, there is a need to re‐think what impact means in relation to accountability initiatives, and to governance and social change efforts more broadly. This represents a serious challenge to the prevailing impact paradigm, posed by the realities of unaccountable governance, unproven accountability programming and uncertain evidence of impact. A learning approach to evaluation and final impact assessment would give power and politics a central place in monitoring and evaluation systems, continually test and revise assumptions about theories of change and ensure the engagement of marginalised people in assessment processes. Such an approach is essential if donors and policy makers are to develop a reliable evidence base to demonstrate that transparency and accountability work is of real value to poor and vulnerable people.

Inhabiting Or Occupying the Web?: Virtual Communities and Feminist Cyberactivism in Online Spanish Feminist Theory and Praxis

This article examines the relationships between gender and technology in Spanish feminist praxis online and argues that different perspectives on online feminist community-building offer distinct responses to cyberactivism, which is considered central to sustaining efforts for social change. To ascertain whether Spanish virtual communities and cyberactivism have the potential to address the challenges posed by the relations between gender and technology, we analyse feminist scholar Remedios Zafra's theoretical proposals, and the different ways in which this theory intersects with the cyberactivism put forth by two feminist web portals, Ciudad de Mujeres and Mujeres en Red. We will discuss to what degree particular Spanish feminist theory and practice online adapts to or challenges utopianism regarding the liberating potential of technology. We will also examine how, in the face of critical arguments about such liberatory possibilities, two options present themselves for women's effective use of technology: inhabiting or occupying the web through the construction of feminist communities online.

Examining Systems Change in the Response to Domestic Violence: Innovative Applications of Multilevel Modeling.

Facilitating systems change in the response to domestic violence has been touted as a central goal in the effort to hold systems accountable and create a coordinated response for survivors. However, examination of systems change and whether particular social change efforts (e.g., coordinating councils) contribute to such change is a notoriously difficult research endeavor due in large part to methodological barriers, including those that stem from nonexperimental designs and complex data that are characterized as nested and measured in proportions. This article describes important methodological challenges and proposes innovative techniques to address these challenges. Specifically, multilevel modeling is applied to examine two key systems markers, including protection order and domestic violence program referral rates over time in one state. For each marker, the methodological approach is highlighted and innovations in employing multilevel modeling are discussed.

Revaluing Student Knowledge through Reflective Practice on Involvement in Social Justice Efforts

Based on our experience as social work educators teaching a practice seminar, we describe an activity to revalue student knowledge and to reaffirm the importance of reflective practice for knowledge building and for social transformation. We focus on an activity that sought to engage students in a reflection on the barriers that impede them from becoming or remaining engaged in social change efforts and the facilitative factors that could help them to overcome such barriers. Throughout the paper, we argue that participatory reflection activities revalue student knowledge and favour their active involvement in the educational process. We highlight the communal nature of the activity and student feedback about their participation in this educational experience. We conclude by suggesting future directions for research and teaching.

Lots of Aloha, Little Data: Data and Research on Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders

Knowledge is power in social change efforts, and data and diverse approaches are needed to fuel it. Recommendations from this section's experts in the field are united in calling for using Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines consistently; disaggregating data collection and reporting on socioeconomic, educational, cultural, youth, and health challenges facing Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs); improving data estimates by addressing small sample sizes with oversampling methods and targeted surveys; and collaborating with public and private community-based organizations to promote high response rates and/or data partnerships. A great need exists for trend analyses over time on NHPIs. These analyses will shed insight on the effects of programs and policies, including longitudinal studies, such as the ECLS and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Consistently, research by these authors highlights the power of culturally relevant approaches and the importance of developing innovat...

Lots of Aloha, Little Data: Data and Research on Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders

Knowledge is power in social change efforts, and data and diverse approaches are needed to fuel it. Recommendations from this section's experts in the field are united in calling for using Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines consistently; disaggregating data collection and reporting on socioeconomic, educational, cultural, youth, and health challenges facing Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs); improving data estimates by addressing small sample sizes with oversampling methods and targeted surveys; and collaborating with public and private community-based organizations to promote high response rates and/or data partnerships. A great need exists for trend analyses over time on NHPIs. These analyses will shed insight on the effects of programs and policies, including longitudinal studies, such as the ECLS and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Consistently, research by these authors highlights the power of culturally relevant approaches and the importance of developing innovative approaches to data, knowledge, and research that embrace indigenous perspectives in program and policy design, particularly in education, health, and science.

Could this be Political Anthropology? Reflections on Studying Conservative Evangelical Subcultures

For the last three decades (and in fact, the length of U.S. history), faith-based social and political movements – right, left, and center – have been sculpting the American political landscape. Yet the vast majority of our discipline’s coverage of religion and politics (at least in the U.S.) has, until recently, depended on quantitative analysis, usually using large-scale survey and opinion polling on attitudes, practices, and beliefs. If political scientists hope to understand religious politics and faith-based social change efforts in more than superficial, stereotyping ways, we must be willing to explore religious subcultures up close. That involves developing a set of ethnographic research skills that may be less familiar (or comfortable) for political scientists than for sociologists and anthropologists. To some extent, it means carrying out creative observational and interactive research at the fuzzy (and undertheorized) boundary between the realms of “culture” and “politics”.This paper summarizes insights from a multi-methods book project I am completing on racial change efforts among contemporary evangelical Protestants in the U.S. Participants in this movement draw on theology- and culture-based resources to promote a variety of racial change outcomes, including racial reconciliation processes, multiethnic church-building, and cross-racial political coalitions. In addition to using textual analysis, survey data, and interviews with participants in the movement, I conducted ethnographic research in a variety of evangelical cultural contexts (sermons, meetings, prayer groups, workshops, actions), and developed long-term, discussion-based relationships with a few movement leaders. I will discuss the lessons learned and the potential minefields to avoid in studying religious subcultures. My hope is that other political scientists, particularly those working on faith-based movements and the intersections of identities (race, religion, class, gender, etc.) will benefit from these reflections on how we can develop smarter, more creative and nuanced studies of culture and politics.

Betty Friedan: Feminist Icon and Founder of the National Organization for Women

article profiles feminist leader and author Betty Friedan, who founded the National Organization for Women and wrote the book The Feminine Mystique, which is considered by many to be one of the most influential books of the 20th century. A discussion of the contents of Friedan's book, and of Friedan's involvement in social change and political change efforts in the U.S., is presented. Friedan's efforts to launch the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws is examined. An Eleanor Roosevelt Leadership Award which was given to Friedan in 1989 is discussed.

From Environmental Campaigns to Advancing the Public Dialog: Environmental Communication for Civic Engagement

This essay examines the claims of environmental identity campaigns regarding the issue of climate change. Identity campaigns are based on the idea that more effective environmental messages developed through the application of cognitive science by professional communications experts can favorably influence public opinion, and thus support legislative action to remedy this issue. Based on a review of the sociological and psychological literature regarding social change and mobilization, I argue that while this approach may offer short term advantages, it is most likely incapable of developing the large scale mobilization necessary to enact the massive social and economic changes necessary to address global warming. Specifically, theoretical and empirical research on the role of the public sphere, civil society and social movements shows that democratic civic engagement is core to successful social change efforts. However, identity campaigns focus on a communications process that centers on elite led one way communications, which falls to allow for any form of civic engagement and public dialogue. This undermines the creation of a democratic process of change and reinforces the professionalization of political discourse, leading to a weakening of the mobilization capacity over this issue of global warming. The essay concludes with the outlines of an environmental communication process that aims at enhancing civic engagement and democratic decision making.

Engaged scholarship: reflections and research on the pedagogy of social change

Significant shifts are occurring in higher education pedagogy, research methodology, and community development, ones that value civic engagement and experiential learning as bridges to holistic education and sustainable social change. Engaged scholarship through university–community partnerships can result in providing a well-rounded education for students, a widening of the university's knowledge base, and an empowering investment in community change. Yet, perpetuating unequal power relations and contributing to a deficit-based approach of service can thwart the social change efforts of community-based education. Critically engaging these complex notions, while integrating promising pedagogical practices, is crucial for effective service-learning and community-based research. This paper provides an overview of these topics and the personal and collective challenges and benefits students, faculty, and communities face as a result of campus–community partnerships.

Human Rights in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization: The Alien Tort Claims Act and Grassroots Mobilization in Doe v. Unocal

This article examines a widely publicized corporate accountability and human rights case filed by Burmese plaintiffs and human rights litigators in 1996 under the Alien Tort Claims Act in U.S. courts, Doe v. Unocal, in conjunction with the three main theoretical approaches to analyzing how law may matter for broader social change efforts: (1) legal realism, (2) Critical Legal Studies (CLS), and (3) legal mobilization. The article discusses interactions between Doe v. Unocal and grassroots Burmese human rights activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, including intersections with corporate accountability activism. It argues that a transnationally attuned legal mobilization framework, rather than legal realist or CLS approaches, is most appropriate to analyze the political opportunities and indirect effects of Doe v. Unocal and similar litigation in the context of neoliberal globalization. Further, this article argues that human rights discourse may serve as a common vocabulary and counterhegemonic resource for activists and litigators in cases such as Doe v. Unocal, contrary to overarching critiques of such discourse that emphasize only its hegemonic potentials in global governance regimes.