Scholarship increasingly recognizes citizenship as a key axis of inequality in the criminal justice system, yet the intersection of geographic origin with noncitizen punishment remains underexplored. The current study addresses this gap by examining the role of region and country of citizenship in criminal case processing using data on all arrests in Texas from 2006 to 2018. Region-level analyses reveal that harsher outcomes experienced by noncitizens in Texas courts are attributable to Mexican and Central American citizenship, even after accounting for legal status. Novel, granular analyses by country of citizenship uncover additional within-region heterogeneity, demonstrate punitive outcomes for defendants from Southeast Asian countries, and suggest legal status operates differently across national origin in Texas courts. Results highlight the importance of the crimmigration-geographic origin nexus in shaping the case processing of noncitizens, underscoring the need for more nuanced analyses of noncitizen inequality in the criminal legal system and beyond.
Despite the growing attention to Christian nationalism's influence on Americans' views regarding politics and science, its influence on environmental attitudes in particular remains under-examined. This gap is surprising given Christian nationalism's documented associations with anti-science attitudes, conspiracy beliefs, "end times" theology, and right-wing partisanship, each of which track closely with environmental attitudes. Building on research showing the contingent relationship between conservative Christianity and views on the environment, we theorize the link between Christian nationalism and beliefs about protecting the environment will be contingent on framing the issue in secular or religious terms. Drawing on data from a large, nationally representative sample, initial analyses show Christian nationalism is among the strongest predictors of minimizing environmental protection and greater climate skepticism. However, leveraging a question-wording experiment in the survey, we find that when environmental protection is phrased as "our God given role as stewards to take care of the earth" rather than in secular terms, Christian nationalism strongly corresponds to viewing environmental protection as more important. Findings affirm that issue framing matters greatly in helping Americans with even the most right-wing Christian views (who for numerous ideological, theological, and partisan reasons tend to deprioritize the environment) see the importance of environmental protection.
The public continues to rely on the news media for information about hate (or bias) crime, yet little is known about how news workers select bias crimes to cover in ways that may impact public and political discourse. Leveraging perspectives on news media construction, the current study explores how a myriad of offender-, victim-, and incident-level attributes are associated with measures of local, regional, and national print news media coverage of 216 bias murders occurring in the United States between 2000 and 2019. Findings reveal that most bias murders receive at least some coverage, especially in mid-sized regional papers. What makes homicides newsworthy in general, however, is unique from bias homicide in key ways. In addition, not all bias murders are equally likely to receive coverage, and some bias murders receive significantly more coverage than others. For example, fatal attacks targeting religious groups and immigrants were relatively more likely to be covered by news media compared to other victim groups. Several possible explanations are offered, including that deadly violence targeting these groups is more newsworthy because they are relatively rarer forms of violence, often result in more deaths, and may be thought to resonate more with news media audiences.
Professional mental health organizations widely embrace gender-affirmative therapy as an approach to supporting transgender (trans) clients in their identities, shifting away from historically pathologizing views. However, an increasingly influential gender exploratory therapy movement now urges therapists to probe trans clients' identities for pathological causes, presenting their model as a neutral alternative to both affirmation and "conversion" or change therapy rooted in conservative religious beliefs. Using a qualitative, comparative content analysis, I examine the discursive strategies that advocates of gender exploratory, change, and affirmative therapies use to legitimate their models. I find that although gender exploratory therapy advocates assert a boundary between their practices and religious change therapy, these models involve similar interventions based on a construction of trans identities as unhealthy deviations from "biological" reality. Moreover, both exploratory and change therapy advocates strategically mobilize doubt to challenge professional and state regulations and promote their favored practices. These results integrate literatures on boundary work and the politics of doubt to illustrate how professional movements legitimate interventions that contradict prevailing health-scientific knowledge. Additionally, this analysis contributes to trans studies by elucidating framing processes that potentially disseminate re-pathologizing views of trans identity to diverse audiences.
This article examines how Chilean student movements navigated the tension between leverage, visibility, and repression across three protest cycles (2001, 2006, and 2011). It distinguishes between structural disruption that interrupts the routine functioning of institutions, most notably through occupations, and invasive disruption that disturbs everyday operations. Drawing on a protest-event dataset triangulated with interviews and secondary sources, the study shows that structural disruption in the form of occupations was more likely when protests advanced educational claims against educational targets, while invasive disruption was more likely when protests targeted the government. Invasive tactics and government targeting increased the likelihood of reported conflictual incidents, while crucially, the relationship between occupation and confrontation was historically contingent. During Bachelet's administration (2006-2009), occupations were widely re-signified as nonviolent and legitimate, and they were associated with lower probabilities of reported incidents. As demands broadened, students increasingly turned to invasive disruption to secure public visibility and exert pressure, while innovating with symbolic and performative tactics to maintain legitimacy and mitigate repression risks. The findings highlight how tactical choice reflects historically situated struggles over meaning, political context, and organizational learning across protest cycles.
Flexible working is advocated to reduce gender inequalities in labor market exit risks by supporting work-life balance. However, research is limited on how employer-set and employee-set flexible working arrangements are associated with labor market exits and how the associations vary by gender and parenthood, since women, especially mothers, have less access to employee-set flexibility and are at heightened risk of leaving the labor market. To help address this gap, this study uses German Socio-Economic Panel data (2003-2021) and discrete-time event history models. Findings show that employer-set flexibility does not reduce labor market exit risks, and for fathers, it correlates with higher exit risks compared to fixed schedules. Conversely, employee-set flexibility correlates with a lower risk of labor market exit for all, but its protective effect is stronger for fathers (vs. childless men) and less effective for mothers. Mothers, particularly with young children under 10, still face higher exit risks even with employee-set flexibility. Overall, while autonomy over work schedules supports labor market participation, it alone cannot fully address the "motherhood penalty," likely due to blurred work-family boundaries, work cultures, and gender norms. Policy interventions should support father's childcare involvement, challenge discrimination in worker evaluations, and address long-work-hour cultures in flexible work.
In 2020, students and student activists across the United States engaged in campus activism in response to racism and anti-Blackness. While many studies have investigated these movements and the immediate institutional responses during that time, what remains understudied is the aftermath-the months and years following and the promises of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) made by colleges and universities. This article argues that activism, including campus mobilization after 2020, needs to be situated within a longer arc and narratives of DEI efforts. Grounded in Cho's institutional response framework and Ray's theory of racialized organizations, we explore the perspectives of 22 undergraduate and graduate students (including leaders and activists) through a single institution case study of a predominately white university in the Midwest. Using interviews and focus groups, findings from this qualitative study reveal how institutional responses dilute the transformative force of DEI initiatives and progress over time, thus ultimately unveiling the nonperformance of institutional practices that maintain a status quo. In illuminating what students describe as a "diversity show," we present how the prioritization and protection of the status quo result in engineered exhaustion that ultimately contributes to unending cycles of activism.
Although recent studies have suggested that social media sites play a crucial role in amplifying far-right ideas, the exact mechanisms by which this process occurs remain unclear. To address this gap, I utilize data from life history interviews with 55 far-right youth activists involved in right-wing campus organizations in a major city in central Canada and another in the Midwestern United States. I found that, during interviews, far-right participants made sense of their offline mobilization and involvement in right-wing organizations through their exposure to far-right content during adolescence. Participants recounted their experiences viewing far-right YouTube content, describing how they: 1) developed parasocial relationships with those on the far-right, 2) became politically polarized, and 3) were inspired by online content to seek offline collective mobilization at university. This study examines broader shifts in political engagement and the impact of technology on the future of democracies.
This article examines a recent wave of student-led protests in Serbia and describes how direct democratic practices-participatory plenums-have emerged as adaptive responses to political constraints in a hybrid regime. Sparked by a tragic infrastructural failure that caused the death of 16 people in Novi Sad in November 2024, the mobilization quickly spread across major university centers, combining blockades of higher-education institutions with decentralized tactics and calls for local engagement. Through the analytical lens of direct democracy, and guided by theories of deliberation, affects, and contingency, the article examines how students strategically navigate a landscape shaped by state capture, deepening autocratization, media domination, and limited channels for political agency. Based on interviews conducted at two university units in Belgrade and Novi Sad, the study illustrates how plenums function less as ideological commitments and more as pragmatic strategies for circumventing repression, facilitating collective deliberation, and maintaining agency. Although students recognize the challenges and limited scalability of these models, they emphasize the plenum's ability to rebuild trust and serve as an effective public voice in a hostile environment. The article highlights the potential of direct democracy and flexible organizational forms for collective mobilization, challenging entrenched power dynamics in constrained political conditions.
This analysis utlilizes Fligstein's political-cultural approach to understand how firms in the electric guitar industry have navigated intellectual property protections-namely trademarks and, to a lesser extent, patents-to manage their relationships with other firms in a market space. The study draws from historical and journalistic accounts, legal documents, trade publications, correspondence with market actors, and prior experience with guitars and economic and cultural products. Narratives describing intellectual property disputes are provided, along with a collection of key lessons for understanding the role of intellectual property disputes in managing inter-firm relationships. A key observation derived from this study is that the use of legal institutions to resolve inter-firm disputes can be risky for firms and may, under some circumstances, be unreliable mechanisms for promoting a firm's market position and survivability.
Drawing on Mannheim, we examine how the ebbs and flows of student mobilization have shaped distinct political generations in Chile. We identify four generations forged through key moments of student activism and wider episodes of collective mobilization: the Dictatorship, Democracy, Penguin, and Frontlines generations. We use longitudinal data from the ELSOC study (2016-2023) to trace attitudinal and behavioral patterns of political engagement across cohorts. The findings show that the Penguin and Frontlines generations, socialized during 2006 and 2011-2019 protest cycles, exhibit higher protest levels and electoral participation, especially during the 2019 social uprising and the 2020 plebiscite. They also show stronger digital activism and progressive attitudes, particularly among women. However, generational effects are not static: while early mobilization fosters engagement, demobilization and political fatigue emerge over time, after the 2019 social uprising. Moreover, younger cohorts show declining student movement identification, suggesting a shift in political referents. Our findings indicate that protest waves can shape enduring political dispositions, but these may change as individuals and their political contexts evolve. Generational identities are thus dynamic, contingent on formative experiences and subsequent developments. Understanding these dynamics is crucial, as the endurance of political generations can shape the long-term durability of student movement outcomes.
Organizations often use diversity initiatives to craft an image of moral goodness while doing little to address workplace inequalities. This disconnect is intensified in the U.S. technology industry, where companies attempt to claim identities as progressive diversity supporters despite obvious patterns of inequality and discrimination. How do tech employees make sense of this contradiction? This study combines the sociology of diversity, sociology of organizations, and organizational authenticity literatures to analyze, via 31 in-depth interviews, how employees of a large U.S. tech company evaluate diversity initiatives in the U.S. tech industry. Results show that tech workers question the authenticity of high-tech diversity programs: they frame technology companies as lacking commitment to diversity, overemphasizing conformity to diversity-related norms, and demonstrating dubious inconsistency in their approach to diversity. Nonetheless, they moderate their criticisms by noting that tech companies do "try" to take responsibility for diversity. Interviewees voiced these impressions similarly across race and gender. We therefore argue that the (in)authenticity of diversity initiatives can be a unifying concern amongst individuals with differing social identities. As diversity initiatives exist largely due to social pressures, they will need to overcome issues of inauthenticity in order to survive widespread sociopolitical critiques.
Political actors often associate themselves with positively valenced historical figures (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus) and opponents with negatively valenced figures (e.g., Hitler, Stalin). What factors shape Americans' understandings of such figures' ideological orientations? To what extent are these understandings grounded in facts versus figures' colloquial valence as "heroes" or "villains"? And what are the implications? Drawing on group-identity theories of politics and original nationally representative data in which we had Americans rate historical figures on the left-right ideological spectrum, our analyses revealed three key findings. First, Americans' placement of historical figures appears far more driven by their valence as heroes/villains and their connection to in-group/out-group biases than where such figures would intuitively be placed in light of facts about them or how they were perceived in their time (e.g., left-right ratings for fascist and communist leaders correlate strongly). Second, the strongest predictors of figure placement and polarization are Americans' own ideological and partisan in-group commitments. Third, group differences in Americans' ideological placement of "villains" are more extreme than that of "heroes," suggesting heroes/villains serve as proxies for common in-group/out-group biases. Findings complicate research on the contested nature of history and suggest how historical figures serve different purposes in contemporary partisan rhetoric.
This article examines the stories undocumented students and their citizen allies shared in support of a 2017 Connecticut bill granting undocumented students access to institutional financial aid. Drawing on 113 testimonies submitted to the Connecticut General Assembly, I use narrative analysis to identify five distinct story types. While the existing research on immigration movements tends to examine how differences across political environments shape and constrain claims, this article offers a case in which narrative diversity emerged within a single movement campaign. I find that undocumented students and their allies told stories that reflected not only different strategic orientations but also different ideas about hard work, citizenship, and "deserving" political subjects. While some testimonies aligned with the broader group narrative-emphasizing undocumented students' complexity and decoupling worth from achievement or faultlessness-others reproduced preexisting stories about meritocracy or assimilation. This analysis underscores the moral and affective dimensions of political storytelling, highlighting the need to understand narrative as a site of intergroup differentiation, negotiation, and identity-making within movements. The findings contribute to ongoing discussions in the literatures of social movements and immigrant activism by offering new insights into the political storytelling practices of undocumented students and their allies.
While precarity is increasing both for traditional employees and for contracted gig workers, little is known about how the growth of platforms is impacting non-platform employees. In this article, I examine how the proximity of traditional grocery stores in Southern California to platform firms is impacting job security and working conditions for employees. Using interviews with workers, union representatives, and industry experts alongside analysis of company filings and industry publications, I show how employers are using platforms to reorganize work first, through the creation of positions that organize work in the same way as platforms; second, through the gradual replacement of workers with platform workers; and third, through informal scheduling pressure that combines with platform technologies to push grocery workers to become platform workers. The result of this platformization is a form of hybrid firm that blurs the lines between platform workers and employees. These findings have broad implications for the threat of platformization across sectors but also present an opportunity for unions to adopt a more expansive vision for organizing.
For decades, rival theories have argued about the role and effects of the institutionalization of social movements. In this article, we present a detailed case study of a unique experience of social movement institutionalization and organization building under an authoritarian regime: the institutional reconstruction of the Chilean University Student Movement (USM) from 1983 to 1985 and its aftermath, in the midst of an intense protest cycle against Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. Building on previous social movement studies and using a mixed-methods approach, we find that, as the USM institutionalized during the protest cycle, it became more massive and robust, while its tactics and demands became more complex and sectoral respectively, until the protest cycle declined as democracy was regained. Additionally, we conclude that these changes were also the outcome of strategic decisions by the leadership, which were, in turn, made possible by the institutionalization process. Our findings contribute to a better sociological and historical understanding of the Chilean USM and the anti-authoritarian struggle in which it was involved. Our study also underlines the dynamics of a rapid institutionalization process by a social movement under an authoritarian context.
This study examines how feminist student activists in China navigate illiberal political and academic opportunity structures following major crackdowns on civil society. While existing scholarship suggests that illiberal conditions exacerbate movement fragmentation, this research identifies alternative pathways for mobilization. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with student activists who were active in 2015 and 2024, this article traces shifts in mobilizing strategies and outlines four channels of activism based on institutional context and intended audience within and beyond education institutions. Navigating across these channels requires intensive rhizomatic labor, a decentralized and adaptive form of activist work in illiberal conditions that (1) entails intensive emotional and aspirational labor to manage in/visibility, and (2) curates connections across arenas and audiences beyond traditional institutions. This study suggests that illiberal educational opportunity structures not only shape the scale and form of activism, but also reorganize the kinds of labor students must perform in order to remain politically engaged.
How do civic associations facilitate political socialization? How and why might some activists become more "politicized" than others? This article builds on longstanding efforts to answer these age-old questions, using student-centered social movement organizations (SMOs) as a window into the political socialization process. Drawing on 550 hours of ethnographic fieldwork across four years and in-depth interviews with 90 members of two organizations in Wisconsin that work with young students of color, I make three contributions. First, I theorize politicization as an ongoing, multi-sited process as opposed to a static trait. Second, I specify various sites of political learning that civic organizations provide access to. Third, I identify three conditions that help transform political learning into politicization: (1) active, (2) sustained participation (3) across multiple mutually reinforcing sites. This research provides practical insights into how student-centered SMOs cultivate political interest among young people to address persistent political inequalities in the United States.
How do emotions shape boundary work among populists and anti-populists? Based on 52 in-depth interviews, we analyze how political activists construct their positions through "emotive contestation." Much of the existing literature emphasizes the negative feelings of populists, ignores the centrality of emotions in anti-populism, and handles emotions and rationality as mutually exclusive. Without denying the centrality of fear and resentment to some populism, we draw attention to the richness of not only emotions, but active emotional work among both populists and anti-populists. The concept "emotive contestation" helps us unpack how activists use both reason and feelings to distinguish the people from the elite, responsible from irresponsible politicians, and/or left- from right-wing populists. Anxiety, hope, disgust, fury, self-confidence, joy, gratitude, fear, love, timidity, and contempt, as well as actors' conscious management of these feelings, are essential to political group formation. The centrality of "emotive contestation" to populism and anti-populism belies scholarly attributions of emotional irrationality to populists and non-emotive rationality to their detractors.
