Winning Coverage

This study investigates the relationship between Palestinian Women's Movement(s) (PWMs) and the Palestinian Nationalist Movement (PNM). A closer look at the descriptive research about (PWMs) indicates that both movements have generally been perceived as one entity by some Palestinian activists as well as scholars who have explored Palestinian nationalism. Here, we address questions about the nature of women's activism in Palestine and seek to assess to what extent this organizing and mobilization form a social movement, particularly questions that focus on important factors such as faction dynamics, funding dynamics, perceptions and relationships issues, leadership features and religion dynamics. Taking into consideration the specificity of women's movements in a nation that has survived military occupation for over five decades under military occupation, this research draws on a number of theories, including resource mobilization and resource dependence as well as political opportunity theories. The research is rooted in extensive interviews with former and current women activists, in addition to chief executive officers (CEOs) of Palestinian women's movement organizations located in the West Bank, Palestine. Moreover, the researcher utilizes thematic analysis. This study is among very few that seek to shed light on women's activism in Palestine "West Bank and East Jerusalem" through the eyes of a Palestinian-born man who was raised therein and is an integral part of the cultural and academic fabric of that land.

The organizational affiliations of four groups of nineteenth century women in New York State provide the basis for an exploration of tensions between local and national level organizations within a social movement. Information about overlapping membership among women's organizations over a period of almost seventy years is used to map the geography of connections between organizations affiliated with the early women's movement and other voluntary groups. In particular, we explore the connections of the movement's organizations to non-insurgent voluntarism in each setting, describing the range and patterning of organizational ties, the factors that determined the movement's niche in each location, and the differential consequences for national and local organizations within the same movement. Based on this analysis, we propose an ecological model of movement heterogeneity, suggesting that organizational niche differences are a significant source of tension in successful social movements.

This article examines relations between organized feminism and the federal Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, focusing on elements of the Canadian women's movement that targeted federal policy change from 1984 to 1993. In questioning the main priorities of both sides and the potential for conflict between them, the discussion uses the conceptual literature on social movement evolution as a base. It assesses formal decision making across five major policy sectors identified by Canadian feminism and presents the perspectives of movement activists on the Mulroney period. Although comparisons with policy action under the Thatcher and Reagan governments indicate a more pro-feminist record in Canada than the United Kingdom or the United States, Canadian materials suggest a narrowing of common ground between the organized women's movement and federal elites during the Mulroney years.

Scholars of contentious politics have argued that social movements are likely to fare best where “parliamentary politics, democratic institutions, and durable political competition” have already taken root. In places where those conditions do not hold, such as the post-Soviet states, we can fully expect social movements to look and behave differently from their Western counterparts. But whatever their appearance and characteristics, all social movements – in any country – are engaged in attempts to serve essentially the same purpose: to work toward social change that will rectify a situation perceived as unjust. In other words, social movements strive to alter the status quo of the power distribution in society – whether at the level of material resources or the more intangible level of status and “identity.” Most often, social movements, including the women's movement in Russia, entail struggle over a combination of these material and intangible interests.

This paper examines the history of women's movements, focusing on the "second wave" feminism and its aftermath in Japan. After the enactment of the Basic Law for Gender Equal Society in 1999, Japanese feminists have been facing difficulties with attacks from right wingers. The author carries out a historical examination of feminism to explore the problems and determine the future possibilities for feminism, women's movements, and social movements as a whole.Although women's liberation movement in the first half of the 1970s and women's movements after 1975-the UN International Year of Women-had rather different and even conflicting ideas and organizational principles, these two tend to be acknowledged as the "second wave, " as if these two movements are totally continuous. Such historicism reveals that feminists nowadays fail to recognize the political radicalism of women's liberation and the transfiguration of women's movements as they grew and became institutionalized.The history of feminism exemplifies the struggle that social movements underwent to acquire political power. Women's movements, as well as gay movements and other minorities'movements, cannot help being ambivalent about power as they succeed; they will not be able to make any progress without power while they turn themselves to be a part of existent social structure against which they have fought as they acquire power. By overcoming the difficulty in a dialectic manner, feminism will be able to thrive as a 'new social movement' in the twenty-first century.

The relationship between feminism and socialism in both the theoretical and practical realms has been marked with difficulty and “unhappiness.” Feminists have criticized leftists for their lack of attention to sexual domination, and many socialists, in turn, have looked at women's liberation movements as a bourgeois deviation or, worse yet, a conspiracy against the workers' struggle. In 19th-century social democratic movements in Europe, conflicts between feminist-socialist advocates of women's rights such as Clara Zetkin and “proletarian anti-feminism” among workers and communists were constant. Eventually, guided by the theoretical insights of a number of socialist leaders such as Bebel, Engels, and Zetkin, socialist parties of the First and Second Internationals came to realize that the cause of the women's movement was just and to accept autonomous women's organizations. The Third International, or Comintern, although it initially claimed to liberate women “not only on paper, but in reality, in actual fact,” treated the inequality of women as a secondary consideration. Focusing on production and labor conflict, the Comintern paid attention only to women's exploitation by capital to the extent that “by the end of the 1920s, any special emphasis on women's social subordination in communist propaganda or campaigning came to be regarded as a capitulation to bourgeois feminism.” Leftist women activists lost their organizational autonomy and had to work under the supervision of their national communist party.

Spatial geographies, socio-demographic factors and social trust in women's organisations in Africa

The wave of sit-ins that swept through the American South in the spring of 1960 transformed the struggle for racial equality. This episode is widely cited in the literature on social movements, but the debate over its explanation remains unresolved—partly because previous research has relied on case studies of a few large cities. The authors use event-history analysis to trace the diffusion of sit-ins throughout the South and to compare cities where sit-ins occurred with the majority of cities where they did not. They assess the relative importance of three channels of diffusion: movement organizations, social networks, and news media. The authors find that movement organizations played an important role in orchestrating protest; what mattered was a cadre of activists rather than mass membership. There is little evidence that social networks acted as a channel for diffusion among cities. By contrast, news media were crucial for conveying information about protests elsewhere. In addition, the authors demonstrate that sit-ins were most likely to occur where there were many college students, where adults in the black community had greater resources and autonomy, and where political opportunities were more favorable.

My reflections draw attention to the General German Women's Association (German: Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein—ADF), which was founded on 18th October 1865 under the chairwomanship of writer, journalist and publicist Louise Otto-Peters (1819–1865). This event marks the beginning of the organized women's movement in Germany. I will pay special attention to Louise Otto-Peters, who not only initiated the ADF and chaired it for many years, she was also its most important theoretical thinker, and crucially, developed specific policies for women. This happened at a time when women were largely excluded by law from political participation. They did not have the right to vote until 1918 and were therefore unable to play any role in city and state parliaments, or in the Reichstag, either. Until 1908, they were not even allowed to be members of political parties or associations with a political orientation. The first part of this article sets out to depict Louise Otto-Peter's views and visions based mainly on her writings “Das Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb. Blicke auf das Frauenleben der Gegenwart” (The Right of Women to Gainful Employment. Views on Contemporary Women's Lives) from 1866, and “Frauenleben im Deutschen Reich. Erinnerungen aus der Vergangenheit mit Hinweis auf Gegenwart und Zukunft” (Women's Lives in the German Reich. Memories from the Past with Reference to the Present and Future) from 1876. The second part attempts an appraisal of her ideas against the backdrop of the existing gender order and the dominant gender thinking. Part three is interested in the legitimization of her visions and, to this end, examines important—but by no means all—discernible lines of argumentation and interpretations.

What drives engagement with civic organizations addressing women's issues? While past work suggests that individuals' preferences regarding civic engagement are influenced by geographic proximity, it remains unclear whether proximity or other organizational attributes shape civic engagement with organizations focused on women's issues. Drawing on interviews of volunteers with women's civic organizations, this study develops an inductive theory about how proximity – both geographic and in terms of the intervention or approach to advocacy – shapes engagement with women's organizations. More specifically, it argues that individuals are more likely to engage with organizations that are local and that provide direct interventions that target individual needs. We test the implications of this theory with an original survey experiment in the United States. We find that individuals prefer to volunteer with local over national women's organizations and prefer organizations that provide direct support rather than indirect interventions. There are no significant differences between men and women; those that identity as feminist and not; and those with past volunteer experience. These findings help us understand how organizational attributes shape preferences for civic engagement and demonstrate that, even amid deep political polarization, individuals still prioritize local and immediate responses to women's issues rather than national and institutional solutions.

British research on social movements, with a few exceptions, has been criticised for making little reference to social movement theory, such that the term, social movement is often used as an unproblematic descriptor. This failure leaves intact assumptions about the relationship between the aims, organisation and activity of social movements and the `interests' that underlie them. This paper attempts to integrate theoretical and substantive analyses of social movements in the context of the `two women's movements' in the United States and Britain which have had the family as a key focus for mobilisation: one conventionally associated with feminism, the other a mass movement of women mobilised to challenge feminism's claim to speak on their behalf. The analysis reveals the limitations of both mainstream and radical/Marxist explanations of social movements on account of their shared reductionist orientation. It suggests that a more fruitful account is provided by resource mobilisation and post-Marxist theorists who, despite drawing on different traditions and questions, recognise the autonomy of politicised culture. The article concludes by questioning whether any foundationalist notion of `interests' and the associated concept of `identity' can provide the basis for grounding political behaviour.

The past 60 years have brought significant changes in the lives of women living in Eastern and Central Europe. The rise of socialism in the region ushered in certain rights that women in the West would not see for decades. Despite the gains made behind the Iron Curtain during this era, independent women's organizations struggled to gain political recognition. The fall of socialism created new opportunities and challenges for women's and feminist organizations. Economic and political transitions and European Union mandates constitute the broad context within which women's organizations have proliferated in the past two decades in this region. These organizations have provided much needed social services, fought for women's reproductive and employment rights, aided survivors of violence, including war victims of rape and torture, and worked for peace in war‐torn areas.

Ever since the European socialist labor movement took up the cause of female emancipation, Marxist parties have incorporated special women's commissions or caucuses. Those Marxist parties that have come into power since 1917 have continued this part of the traditional commitment to women's liberation. In the Soviet Union and East Europe there are official women's organizations of varying visibility. But western feminists tend to doubt that these actually represent women's movements. 1 After all, they exist only under the aegis of male-elite, oneparty regimes. These regimes allow only one view-the so-called Marxist view-of the woman question, that women's emancipation is possible only after the revolutionary working class achieves the abolition of private property, freeing women for work and economic independence. Since women's emancipation has already been achieved, by definition, what is the purpose of women's organizations in countries where the workers' vanguard party, the Communist Party, has come to power? Indeed, even in those countries of East Europe that had women's movements prior to revolution or sovietization, women's organizations seem to have represented women less than they served the governments' needs: to mobilize women into an expanded labor force; to support disarmament or selected international revolutionary movements; to celebrate and legitimize the state. At the same time, speaking directly for or about women is limited in the way all non-Party organizations are limited: nothing may be said or done that can be construed as helping the enemies of socialism, or as threatening Party control. Although the Party has led the working class to power, it still must defend this power against western imperialism, in all its guises, through unity behind the Party. The loyalty of nonParty organizations is maintained through simultaneous membership of a portion of their leaders in the Party itself and through police vigilance. Regardless of how useful Marxist theory may be for feminists elsewhere, under these conditions it serves in the socialist countries to obscure genuine discussion. Published statements by women's organizations are often litanies of citations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. One essential issue that they avoid is the relationship between men and women in familiestheir roles in the household-since this is bourgeois feminism, another guise of western imperialism. Added to the difficulties faced by women who want to work on behalf of women in these countries, official pronouncements notwithstanding, is women's overall condition of powerlessness. Women are mostly in badly paid, gender-determined jobs, are simultaneously personally responsible for domestic labor and child-raising, and in backward circumstances at that, and they have little time or energy to better themselves as individuals or as a group. Nevertheless, it is precisely this condition that increasingly characterizes women in industrial countries the world over. Women in the West have been driven to fight for themselves, and women in East Europe and the Soviet Union can be expected to do the same. Just because their societies are not pluralist does not necessarily mean that women cannot develop their own strategies. Above and beyond laws guaranteeing equal rights in these countries, in the past decade there have been many legal changes that far outstrip those in most capitalist countries.

Social media is being employed to build support for social, economic, and political justice (Selander et al. 2016; Vaast et al. 2014) in movements such as occupy Wall Street, violence against women's movement and global sustainability movement. These movements have used social media in ways that goes beyond simple communications. As social media allows people to produce and share user generated content, they enable a certain set of affordances of these technologies (Bharati et al 2015; Bharati et al 2014). The social media affordances, available to both collective and individual actors, translate into capabilities afforded to social movements (Tufecki 2014). Research on connective action has examined the effects of digital action repertoires on interaction and engagement such as in the Tea Party and Occupy movements (Agarwal et al. 2014; Selander et al. 2016). Social media can also facilitate mobilization of movement and participation by new volunteers and oftentimes provides a transnational character by diffusing actions beyond the virtual (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). Conversation, an essential part of social movements, shapes “social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants&x201D; (Tilly 2002, p. 122). In a personal interaction that involves repeated organized interactions between individuals, typically, leads to shared values and trust. The role of social media technologies in furthering this conversation has to be studied and its' influence on social movement ascertained. A few scholars have started to investigate social media affordances and capabilities, especially focused on discourse, during contentious collective action. Still the research has been limited to studying mechanisms of participation, development of a sense of collective identity, creation of community, and framing of political discourse (Farrell 2012; Garrett 2006). Social media data on social movements can involve impersonal “like&x201D; and “share&x201D; to more engaged conversations. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube offer a wide communicative and discourse reach in networks with text, image, audio, and video data. This social media based big data, consisting mostly of unstructured data, comes in the form of social media posts, digital pictures and videos. The symposium will discuss how formal organizational structures and practices might be integrated with social media capabilities to reinforce and enhance social movement organizations as leaders in social change movements. It will explore the characteristics of social media discourse and assess the dynamics of social movements and, subsequent, impact on real-world protests. The symposium will also demonstrate how discourse analysis can be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns. The panel symposium will focus on theoretical and methodological challenges of social media analytics, big data and social movements. Panelists will engage the audience in an interactive discussion on: 1) Theoretical challenges: a. How and why are social movement recruitment and engagement mechanisms being impacted as a result of social media? b. How do we advance theory on social media and social movements when we are overwhelmed with social media based big data? c. What approach should we undertake if big data analysis contradicts most theories on social media and social movements? d. How do we address the issue of generalizability of social media and social movement research when data collection was limited to one social media platform, albeit involving big data? 2) Methodological challenges: a. What methodological approaches have worked in the analysis of social media, big data and social movements? b. How can discourse analysis be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns evident in social media-based big data? c. How can we employ social media analytics to investigate image and video data? d. What combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodologies be employed for big data and social media analytics in the context of social movements? e. What are the limitations of quantitative data analysis techniques, such as structural equation modeling, because of an extremely large sample size? f. What are the limitations of qualitative data analysis techniques as they become extremely labor intensive and, maybe even, impractical because of big data?

Scholars often characterize congressional response to public opinion as either reflecting opinion and legislating accordingly or manipulating opinion for political ends. When the wider political environment contains an active, high-profile social movement with rapid shifts in public opinion occurring, the relationship between Congress and opinion appears to be less unidimensional than these options suggest. To test the relationship between Congress and public opinion on women's rights issues, we first coded and factor analyzed New York Times events data chronicling the degree of agitation on behalf of women's rights, 1950-86. We then compiled data examining legislative activity on laws addressing women as a group and public opinion about women's political role. These measures were used to evaluate alternative interpretations of the relationship between Congress and public opinion. Using a three-stage least squares model reinforced by several case studies of congressional activity on laws addressing women's issues, we conclude that during the time when there was an active women's movement, the relationship between Congress and public opinion was reciprocal. Congress and the women's movement competed for leadership of public opinion. Congress both led opinion and followed it, bringing about change that was swifter and less predictable than in normal periods of interest group politics.