Excerpt: Boaz Ganor’s Global Alert: The Rationality of Modern Islamist Terrorism and the Challenge to the Liberal Democratic Order provides in its eleven brief chapters an analysis of and prescription for liberal democratic vulnerabilities to present-day Islamist-inspired terrorism.

Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting extant laws of behavior. This strategy, in conjunction with the political profitability of opposing the group, explains why the group’s activism triggered extensive legal disputes and modifications at multiple levels of governance. Westboro’s actions and use of symbols—and those of others against the group—lay bare multiple threads in the sacred cultural fabric of American society.

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Militant Islamist Sayyid Imam's legal critique of Al Qaeda's anti-U.S. mass casualty terrorism holds great potential utility for counterterrorist messaging strategy. In this article, a jihad–realist Islamist theological–jurisprudential methodology is first defended as the means most productive for delegitimizing Al Qaeda among high value, religiously motivated recruits. Second, Sayyid Imam's specific allegations and detailed Sharia proofs against Al Qaeda are presented. Finally, implications are drawn for U.S. counterterrorist messaging focusing especially on the utility of wielding this theological–juridical approach as compared to other “counternarrative” approaches, and the vital need to accurately characterize Islamism and its relation to terrorism.

Book Summary: Does theism dominant the language and practices of public life in the United States? This volume explores this question from a humanist perspective, and in so doing it provides insight into the relationship of religion to public policy, and offers ways to advance a more democratic and secular public arena.

Research on the topics of atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion has been limited during much of the last century. We explain the reasons for a lack of research in this field and discuss the recent interest in this topic. The most recent wave of research has been concentrated during the past decade and tends to look at the dual issues of who composes the religiously unaffiliated and why they choose this self-identification. Recent research has begun to take a much wider and deeper view on the subject. This includes research on particular segments of the population such as atheists, as well as understanding how the religiously unaffiliated are viewed by the broader culture. We conclude by describing important directions for future research. In particular, there is a need to break out the separate forms of irreligion and use creative new methodologies to find and study this significant portion of the population.

Gender gaps in religiosity among Western populations, such that women are more religious than men, are well documented. Previous explanations for these differences range from biological predispositions of risk aversion to patriarchal gender socialization, but all largely overlook the intersection of social statuses. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, we contribute to the cultural and empirical analysis of gender gaps in religiosity by documenting an interactive effect between gender, education, and political views for predicting religious nonaffiliation and infrequent attendance at religious services among Americans. For highly educated political liberals, gender gaps effectively disappear, such that men and women are almost equally likely to be secular (or religious). The results have implications for the long-standing disputes about the gendered “nature” of religiosity and highlight the importance of multiple intersecting statuses and modalities in shaping aggregate patterns of religiosity and secularity.

Adam Gadahn's Abbottabad letter offers a rare opportunity to examine how this Al Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL) media operative and spokesman conceptualizes and executes media warfare. In this article, I first introduce, depict, and employ the author's Terrorist Quadrangle Analysis (TQA) as a useful heuristic for conceptualizing and representing the four interrelated components of the AQSL terrorist enterprise: political objectives, media warfare, terrorist attacks, and strategic objectives. This TQA construct is then employed to conceptualize Gadahn's media warfare acumen. Gadahn is shown to be an adept communications warfare operative who conscientiously disaggregates and evaluates key target audiences, messengers, messaging, and media. Gadahn's vehement critique of select “jihadi” groups, in particular Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP), al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), is then described. Key here is how and why Gadahn denounces their indiscriminate, murderous terrorist attacks on Muslim non-combatant civilians and other protected persons as effectively subverting his intended AQSL media warfare strategy and undermining AQSL strategic and religio-political objectives. A concluding section briefly summarizes these chief findings, offers select implications for scholarship and counter-AQSL messaging strategy, and identifies study limitations.

Book Summary: The Routledge Handbook on Deviance brings together original contributions on deviance, with a focus on new, emerging, and hidden forms of deviant behavior. The editors have curated a comprehensive collection highlighting the relativity of deviance, with chapters exploring the deviant behaviors related to sport, recreation, body modification, chronic health conditions, substance use, religion and cults, political extremism, sexuality, online interaction, mental and emotional disorders, elite societal status, workplace issues, and lifestyle. The selections review competing definitions and orientations and a wide range of theoretical premises, while addressing methodological issues involved in the study of deviance. Each section begins with an introduction by the editors, anchoring the topics in relevant theoretical and methodological contexts and identifying common themes as well as divergence. Providing state-of-the-art scholarship on deviance in modern society, this handbook is an invaluable resource for researchers and students engaged in the study of deviance across a range of diciplines including criminology, criminal justice, sociology, anthropology, and interdisciplinary departments, including justice studies, social transformation, and socio-legal studies.

This dissertation project seeks to address the sociological processes, dynamics, and mechanisms inflecting how and why U.S. society reproduces a sexually dimorphic, binary gender structure. The project builds upon the work of sociologists of gender on the doing gender framework, intersectional feminist approaches to identity formation, and hegemonic masculinity and relational theories of gender. In a 2012 article in Social Science and Medicine presenting contemporary concepts in gender theory to the health-oriented readers of the journal, R. W. Connell argues that much public policy on gender and health relies on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Connell contends that poststructuralist theories highlighting the performativity of gender improve on the assumption of a categorical binary typical in public policy, but they ignore the insights of sociological theories emphasizing gender as a structure comprising emotional and material constraints of the complex inter-relations among social institutions in which performances of gender are embedded. According to Connell, it is the task of social scientists to uncover “the processes by which social worlds are brought into being through time – the ontoformativity, not just the performativity, of gender.” This project explores the ontoformativity of gender in consideration of Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of the four domains of power. According to Collins, matrices of domination are intersecting and interlocking axes of oppression including but not limited to race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, ability, place, and religion that reproduce social inequalities through their interoperation in the cultural, interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary domains of power. West and Zimmerman contrast gender as an axis in the matrix of oppression with site-specific roles, arguing that gender is a master status that is omnirelevant to all situations such that a person is assessed in terms of their competences in performing activities as a man or a woman. The doing gender approach has been accused of theorizing gender as an immutably monolithic social inequality. This project seeks to explicate the dynamics of gender ideology by probing its weaknesses in the interpersonal and cultural domains of power. As Collins and coauthor Sirma Bilge posit, for people oppressed along axes of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, place, ability, and other binaries that constrain their actions in the structural and disciplinary domains of power, “the music, dance, poetry, and art of the cultural domain of power and personal politics of the interpersonal domain grow in significance.” Each of the three components of the dissertation project addresses a facet of mechanisms and processes of the interpersonal and cultural domains of power in (re)producing the binary gender structure in U.S. society. Paper #1, titled, “Integrating Black Feminist Thought into Canonical Social Change Theory,” explicates how people in marginalized social locations mount definitional challenges to their received classifications in the cultural domain of power by rejecting the consciousness of the oppressor and wielding rearticulated collective identity-based standpoints as contextually attuned technologies of power to recast historical narratives. Paper #2, with teenaged co-researcher Emma Draper, titled “Ordering Gender: Interactional Accountability and the Social Accomplishment of Gender Among Adolescents in the U.S. South,” maps how youth theorize interactional accountability processes to binary gender expectations in the interlocking social institutions of medicine, the family, schools, and peer social networks. Paper #3 is a book proposal comprising an introductory chapter. The book will tell the story of how young feminist arts-activists challenge the binary gender structure through resistance in the cultural and interpersonal domains.