This project uses the archive at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international Quaker peace and social justice organization headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, in order to shed light on the globalization resistance labor of the Nationwide Women's Program (NWP) and its transnational networks. The NWP was an internal program at the AFSC, initiated by women staff and committee members who challenged the practices of gender discrimination within the organization and initiated external AFSC programs that served women's unique needs in peace and social justice initiatives. By focusing primarily on the serial inserts of the group's newsletter from 1978 to 1988, entitled Women and Global Corporations: Work, Roles, Resistance, this project draws attention to the dense networks of transnational communication and resistance against global economic restructuring during this time. It uses and challenges social movement scholarship by suggesting that the analytical frameworks of transnational advocacy networks and social movement mobilization more accurately capture the antiglobalization activity that took place several decades prior to when it is conventionally identified in 1999. The project highlights the NWP's social movement brokerage and the embodied social movement activities of the activists, scholars, and laborers in its orbit. These social movement activities included boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, labor organizing, and a plethora of other on-the-ground activities and discursive practices against global corporations and the institutions that supported them. An investigation into the sources of the NWP's knowledge production in brokering this movement reveals both Quaker and feminist influences that call into question the conventionally accepted binary between religion and secularity in the Western imaginary. The presence of Quaker and feminist influences on the NWP's understandings of globalization provides the opportunity for thinking through at least two possibilities: how a tacit Protestant secularism within the organization contributed to its own erasure, and how contemporary globalization narratives are infused with a Protestant secularism that insidiously frames globalization resistance as retrograde and fuels a universalizing (and therefore exclusionary) notion of progress and unsustainable growth. / Religion

The lack of success of the gun control movement and the success of the gun rights movement in the United States have prompted research into the root causes. Although the political infrastructure, organizational resources, and public interest prove to be important factors in a social movement's success, how each social movement frames their arguments is extremely important for proposing policy initiatives and garnering support. In order to understand how gun control and gun rights organizations frame their arguments this study does two things: (1) performs topic modeling on the six gun control organizations' and three gun rights organizations' press statements to see the frames that each social movement engages in, and (2) identifying these frames in the most popular gun control and gun rights organizations on Facebook to predict likes, comments, and shares. This study is able to identify the top frames in the gun control and gun rights social movements and see how followers of each of these movements engage with each of these frames on Facebook.

The indigenous of the Amazon region of Ecuador unite against the petroleum industry and destructive resource extraction practices in order to preserve environment and indigenous cultures. Since the 1990s, the indigenous movement of Ecuador has played out in the international arena and become a transnational movement, which includes social actors from the international legal, human rights, and environmental communities. This transnational movement exemplifies identity politics through the projection of ethnicity and essentialized signifiers of indigenousness. Indigenous actors, Ecuadoran nongovernmental organizations, international filmmakers, and US nongovernmental organizations all use ethnic identity and signifiers via documentaries and cyberspace as symbolic resources to represent the movement. This thesis explores the intersection of external actors (international community of filmmakers and NGOs) and internal actors' (the indigenous themselves and Ecuadoran NGOs) projection of ethnicity as symbolic resource. Utilizing resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory as a syncretic to understand the movement and theoretical contributions of identity and representation to explore the process of mobilization, the study explores the question of ethnic identity as symbolic resource in four documentaries and on fifteen websites. The discourse analysis of the four documentaries and content analysis of the fifteen websites illustrate that there is consistency in the message within the transnational social movement community of actors who strive to work for and on behalf of the indigenous of the Ecuadoran Amazon. / Master of Arts

No

The advances in social media and social computing technologies have dramatically changed the way through which people interact, organize, and collaborate. The use of social media also makes the large-scale data revealing human behavior accessible to researchers and practitioners. The analysis and modeling of social networks formed from relatively stable online communities have been extensively studied. The research on the structural and dynamical patterns of large-scale crowds motivated by accomplishing common goals, named the cyber movement organizations (CMO) or cyber-enabled social movement organizations (CeSMO), however, is still limited to anecdotal case studies. This research is one of the first steps towards the understanding of the CMO/CeSMO based on real data collected from online social media.The focus of my research is on the study of an important type of CMO/CeSMO, the crowd-powered search behavior (also known as human flesh search, HFS), in which a large number of Web users voluntarily gathered together to find out the truth of an event or the information of a person that could not be identified by one single person or simple online searches. In this research, I have collected a comprehensive data-set of HFS. I first introduce the phenomenon of HFS and reviewed the study of online social groups/communities. Then, I present the empirical studies of both individual HFS episodes and aggregated HFS communities, and unveiled their unique topological properties. Based on the empirical findings, I propose two models to simulate evolution and topology of individual HFS networks. I conclude the dissertation with discussions of future research of CMO/CeSMO.

爭議多年的樂生療養院拆遷事件，2007年在網路上引發強大的保留聲浪，部落客主動採訪、報導、串連、評論，讓樂生議題受到主流媒體及政治人物的矚目，進而影響政府決策。在公民新聞並不盛行的台灣，這些具有報導性質的書寫，展現了極大的公民媒體能量。 　　本論文從傳統的公民新聞意理出發，蒐集近年國內外重要的網路公民新聞經驗，探看網路時代公民新聞的變與不變；進而以樂生保留運動為主要案例，紀錄此一公民新聞浪潮爆發、凝聚力量、展現人氣的過程，這些積極的網路使用者運用Web2.0平台工具、在線上及線下活躍串流，讓他們適時填補主流媒體忽視的公共議題，形成一種公民傳播體系。他們的實踐經驗，也隱然投射出台灣公民社會的「運動型媒體」趨勢。 / The incident of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium has caused a dispute amongst our people for many years now. And when the incident aroused the support of majority to preserve the sanatorium through the world-wide web in 2007, bloggers began to voluntarily interview, report, link, and comment on the subject matter, which attracted the attention of mainstream media and political figures. And these attentions even affected the government’s final decision. In the land of Taiwan where civic journalism was not popular, these newsworthy articles show how great the power is of civic journalism. 　　This thesis starts with the traditional concept of civic journalism, introducing important cases on the web from all over the world and to probe into the constancy and inconstancy of civic journalism in the internet era. With the incident of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium as the main subject matter of this thesis, we’ll recount the process in which this citizen news broke-out, united citizen strengths and gained news value. These enthusiastic internet users made use the Web 2.0 tools to actively link everyone together, whether online or offline. They can also work as the supplement to the mainstream media and provide the news that was overlooked, which has now developed into some kind of citizen media system. This realization has also projected the trend of Taiwan society’s event-related media.

Drawing on my own process of entry into local queer, lesbian and feminist public cultures, I argue that a powerful relationship between feminist and lesbian existence can be felt and that this sensibility bears influence on the way queer erotic and politicized identities emerge in relation to one another. These affective links remain frequently unacknowledged and/or are actively repudiated due to popular accounts of feminist genealogy whereby second wave lesbian-feminist positions are rendered fundamentally incompatible with contemporary queer/third wave feminist ones. I challenge this narrative by building on select early articulations of radical lesbian feminism to show that when affirmed consciously, the sense that lesbianism and feminism are interconnected constitutes a “woman-identified experience” and an opportunity to bear witness to the unrealized possibilities of second-wave radical feminism in the present. I conclude that politicized “lesbian” and/or “woman” identification remain indispensable strategic sites from which to observe and confront heteropatriarchy.

Šiame darbe buvo siekiama ištirti Lietuvos Persitvarkymo Sąjūdžio susiformavimą Šiaulių ir Trakų rajonuose, keliant klausimą, ar Sąjūdžio mikro tinklas susikūrė ant anksčiau egzistavusių socialinių tinklų pagrindo ir kas lėmė jo spartų išsiplėtimą. Sąjūdžio organizacinės prielaidos tiriamos remiantis socialinių tinklų analizės metodologine prieiga. Sąjūdžio susiformavimas tiriamas dviem analizės pjūviais: mikro tinklo ir individo lygmeniu. Mikro tinklo analizės pjūvis padės išsiaiškinti, kokių socialinių tinklų pagrindu kūrėsi Sąjūdžio rėmimo grupės, tarybos Trakų ir Šiaulių rajonuose. Pravartu tirti mikro tinklų lygmeniu, nes jis parodo vidinę kolektyvinio veiksmo dinamiką ir tarp tinklo narių esančią tarpusavio santykių konfigūraciją Šis analizės lygmuo parodo, kaip iš gana statiško socialinės struktūros transformuojamasi į dinamišką kolektyvinį veiksmą. Individo lygmuo padeda suvokti sąjūdiečių įsitraukimo į masinio judėjimo mikro tinklą motyvus, socialinės aplinkos patirties reikšmę (atsižvelgiant į baimės, pasitikėjimo faktorius) mikro tinklo vaidmenis, Šiaulių ir Trakų rajonų vietos specifikos įtaka mikro tinklo kūrimuisi.. Remiantis socialinių tinklų teorija tiriama mikro tinklo formavimosi pradiniame etape vidinė struktūra bei pačių sąjūdiečių vaidmuo, ryšių tipų įtaka. Darbe buvo keliama hipotezė, jog periferijos vietovėse gana ankstyvą Sąjūdžio mikro tinklų susikūrimą lėmė anksčiau egzistavę vietos problemos tinklai, o gana vėlyvą mikro tinklo susiformavimą įtakojo... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The aim of this work was to analyze The Formation of Lithuanian Reform Movement by raising a question whether the Reform Movement micro-network formed on the preexisting network basis and what had a reason for its extention. The assumptions of the Reform Movement are analyzed through the methodological access of the social network analysis. The formation of the Reform Movement is analyzed in two sections: the micro-network and individual level. Micro-network analysis section will help to examine on what social network The Reform Movement support groups were forming in Šiauliai and Trakai districts. It is worthwhile to investigate the micro-level network because it reflects the internal dynamics of collective action among network members and the relationship between existing configuration. This level of analysis shows how the relatively static social structure transforms into a dynamic collective action. The individual level helps to find out the reasons of involvement in the mass movements of micro-network, social environment practises (taking into account the fear, confidence factors), also helps to find out the impact of Šiauliai and Trakai districts for micro-network formation. The structure of micro-network formation and the role of people acting in the movement were analyzed using the social network theory. In this work there was hypothesized that the formation of micro-networks was influenced by early local network problems and interpersonal networks. Social network... [to full text]

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

The work examines formation of the Catholic Church's social teaching from the end of the nineteenth century until the end of the World War II. It pays attention to official documents denoting its realm as well as to the response to the programme within the Belgian milieu. On the example of La jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne the work tries to indentify foundations of the Church's social teaching along with changes, shifts and adaptations that appeared in their unique form in the JOC movement. The work also notices origins, formation and development of JOC itself. This historic and religious topic is set in wider social and cultural context. Latter part of the work is devoted to particularities in the acceptance of Church's social teaching in Czechoslovakia in between the world wars.