protests

Wisconsin Public Radio interviewed Allison Daminger (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) about her new book, What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. The book examines how partners split “cognitive labor”, or, the mental effort that goes into running a household. This includes “anticipating issues, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring the results.” While most couples in the study aimed for a 50/50 split of household labor, Daminger found that cognitive labor was typically imbalanced. Among heterosexual couples, women tend to take on more cognitive labor.

Allison Daminger

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University. Ruth Braunstein (Associate Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins University) appeared on WUSA9 to discuss the broader pattern of political violence in the United States. Braunstein commented that political violence has a “tremendous chilling effect on people’s willingness to go into political life, to stand up and speak out for what they believe in.” She also discussed how distrust in political institutions may lead some individuals to violence, which can further erode trust in insituions–a “vicious cycle.” Braunstein also expressed concern to the New York Times that Kirk’s murder could mobilize right-wing groups (including militia organizations): “All it will take is the slightest hint from the political leaders, including the president, but also anyone else, that this is the moment that they’re needed.”

Ruth Braunstein

Laura Garbes (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota) wrote an op-ed for the Minnesota Star Tribune discussing how ‘elitism’ in public media stems from a lack of public funding. “Due to decades of budget cuts led by Republican administrations, public radio has become reliant on a set of mostly white, affluent donors for its financial survival,” Garbes explains. Programming, then, is catered to donor-listeners, leaving behind working-class audiences.

Laura Garbes

Protests are sweeping across France as a part of the Block Everything Movement–a campaign driven by anger over major cuts to public spending. The movement began online among right-wing voices, but has since been embraced by the political left. Quentin Ravelli (Sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research) discussed the movement’s lack of a clear political identity in an RFI article: “Many movements avoid being labelled left or right. This isn’t just strategic: participants often feel that consensus around economic demands matter more than political allegiance. Urgent issues like public services, wages or inflation are seen as priorities.” The movement is drawing comparisons to the 2018 Yellow Vest Movement. Antoine Bristelle (Sociologist at the Jean Jaures Foundation) commented on the demographic differences to The Gazette: “In the ‘Yellow Vest’ movement, we had a rather vulnerable France that was struggling to make ends meet, a lot of workers, a lot of retirees. Whereas here, in terms of age, it’s many young people [that have] a certain vision of the world where there is more social justice, less inequality and a political system that functions differently, better,” Bristielle said.

Quentin Ravelli

In the last few months, President Trump’s incendiary tweets have found a home in sports, including comments on the NFL, the NBA, and college basketball. In a recent article in ABC News, sociologists discuss how Trump’s tweets about sports with high percentages of Black athletes are racially-coded, and may reveal Trump’s own racial bias and attempts to appeal to his political base.

In response to President Trump’s  demand that owners fire NFL players for kneeling, sociololgist Ben Carrington argues,

“When Trump uses language referring to Black athletes or other Black figures that kind of speak out in terms of them being ungrateful and undeserving of their place in sports, he’s re-invoking that dark era in American sports in which that language was explicit and Black players couldn’t play.”

In another example, Trump demanded thanks for keeping three UCLA basketball players out of jail in China after shoplifting, calling the father of one player an “ungrateful fool” and “a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair.” As these tweets gain headlines, the media may miss the core racial issues that drive this kind of dialogue in sports, according to sociologist Doug Hartmann.

“Trump’s been able to make the focus be on whether this is appropriate or not, and how players should be punished or disciplined, and completely distracted our attention from the racial issues that the players who are protesting want to focus our attention on – police brutality, huge wealth gaps, the treatment of African Americans in cities — those are real racial issues.”

In short, Trump’s tweets and the media’s coverage of them divert public attention from larger issues of racial injustice in the United States.

Recent social movements in the United States, like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, have sought to challenge the status quo. While such movements often make the news, less attention is paid to how they achieve success. A recent article in the New York Times by sociologist Kenneth T. Andrews argues that social movements bring about change through exercising different types of power — cultural, disruptive, or organizational.

We are used to seeing cultural or disruptive power from movements in the media, but organizational power is also important. Organizational power is reflected in a movement’s ability to sustain its agenda through ties to other groups. Recent research suggests that after the Tea Party built upon disruptive power gained from initial protests, it established local organizations and supported political candidates that shared its ideas, ultimately transforming the Republican Party. However, as with each mechanism of power, organizational power also has constraints. Andrews explains,

“Staging the occasional protest and raising money are one thing; developing leaders and building constituencies are another. Despite substantial resources and hundreds of organizations, the environmental movement, for example, has not generated the sort of participation sufficient to meet the environmental challenges we face.”

In short, the pathways to power that different social movements utilize are very important to the movement’s success in encouraging change. A movement may have the most success when it combines all three types of power, which helped movements like the Civil Rights Movement. And even if a movement itself is short-lived, the cultural effects may remain long after a movement has fizzled out, and even small-scale changes can still have the cultural power to affect the status quo well into the future.

The first few weeks of the Trump presidency have been eventful, most notably because many of the political actions taken by his administration have been met with widespread protests and marches. With some help from social scientists, a recent article from Vox reviews some of the ways to make protesting more effective.

Though protests can be invigorating, they often fail to influence those in power, says Indiana University sociologist Fabio Rojas. That’s not to say that protesting isn’t worthwhile, however; it just has to be done well. As U-Penn professor Daniel Q. Gillion explains, protest can make a change, but it’s not easy. Some conditions have to be met, including persistence and a significant threshold of people.

First, ensure that that the message is as prominent as possible. The way protests normally go, things can be chaotic or confusing. U-Wisconsin sociologist Pamela E. Oliver states that it’s like having a dozen different sports teams on one field. Research does show, however, that longer and more salient protests predict more change than short-lived and unfocused ones.

Next, try to gather similar causes under one banner. U-Maryland sociologist Dana Fisher describes how the recent Women’s March was not just about women’s issues; many people were there to protest Trump’s comments regarding immigrants or LGBT groups as well. Holding separate protests for each individual issue would dilute their impact, and one large and multifaceted demonstration is more effective. Remember that protesting itself is just a small part of the puzzle. We often turn to the Civil Rights movement as a comparable, historical example of protests in action, but even the Civil Rights movement was about more than protest alone. Boycotting businesses and the bus system was also instrumental in bringing about change, for example, something today’s protestors may want to keep in mind.

Finally, remember that proactive protesting is also important; demonstrating to prevent something from happening is more effective than doing so after the fact. As movements continue to resist discriminatory policies, they would do well to recognize some of these sociological suggestions.   

Last week, an anti-Muslim movie produced in the U.S. influenced protests and attacks in Libya, Egypt, and several other countries. In the aftermath of the protests in Egypt, VOA spoke briefly with Said Sadek, Professor of Political Sociology at American University in Cairo.

According to Sadek, it’s important to realize that majority of people (in any religion) are not extremists but are rather caught by extremists that “try to push the silent majority into extremism, and suspicion, and intolerance.”

These extremist groups often single out media products and use them for their own messages. “There are many sites and many films and books against all religions… Why do you all of a sudden [shed] light on a particular film and ignore the others? This has to be a politically motivated process.”

Unfortunately, many members of civil society do not understand how these media products are produced.  As Sadek explains,

There is a misunderstanding in Muslim countries [about] the relationship between government and media. They still believe it’s like in autocratic regimes, the government orders the media to do this or to do that. President Obama did not order that movie about Islam is made. In fact, he is being accused in America that he is pro-Muslim.