EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply shaken societies and lives around the world. This powerful book reveals how the pandemic has intensified socio-economic problems and inequalities across the world whilst offering visions for a better future informed by social movements and public sociology. Bringing together experts from 27 countries, the authors explore the global echoes of the pandemic and the different responses adopted by governments, policy makers and activists. The new expressions of social action, and forms of solidarity and protest, are discussed in detail, from the Black Lives Matter protests to the French Strike Movement and the Lebanese Uprising. This is a unique global analysis on the current crisis and the contemporary world and its outcomes.

This fully revised and updated edition of Social Movements and Protest Politics provides interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of protest movements. It considers major theories and concepts, which are presented in a clear, accessible, and engaging format. The second edition contains new chapters on methods and ethics of social movement research, and legal mobilisation, protest policing and criminal justice activism, including calls to abolish or defund police made at protests during the COVID-19 pandemic. This edition introduces readers to the concept of the ‘post-protest society’ wherein the right to protest is whittled away to near vanishing point, and authorities have considerable legal recourse to ban protests and render the tactics of protest movements ineffective. The book also looks at recent developments and novel social movements, including Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Gilets Jaunes, #MeToo, and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, as well as the rise of contemporary forms of populism in democratic societies. The book presents specific chapters outlining the early origins of social movement studies and more recent theoretical and conceptual developments. It considers key ideas from resource mobilisation theory, the political process model, and new social movement approaches. It provides extensive commentary on the role of culture in social protest (including visual images, emotions, storytelling, music, and sport), religious movements, geography and struggles over space, media and movements, and global activism. Historical and contemporary case studies and examples from a variety of countries are provided throughout, including the American civil rights movement, Greenpeace, Pussy Riot, Indigenous peoples’ movements, liberation theology, Indignados, Occupy, Tea Party, and Arab Spring. Each chapter also contains illustrations and boxed case studies to demonstrate the issues under discussion. Social Movements and Protest Politics will be an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities wanting to be introduced to or extend their knowledge of the field. The book will also prove useful to university teachers and academic researchers, activists, and practitioners interested in the study of social, cultural, and political protest.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED In this brilliant smart-thinking book about the power and influence of social media, Professor Sinan Aral shows how ‘hyper-socialization’ has profoundly changed us.

A guide through the balancing act of activist, advocate and ally, remembering that just because others are learning you don't need to be the teacher, from the dynamic and sharp co-founder of Media Diversity Australia, Antoinette Lattouf. Poignant, inspiring, funny and most importantly authentic, How to Lose Friends and Influence White People explores how to make a difference when championing change and racial equality. A powerful and personal guide on how to be effective, no matter who you're trying to influence. Whether it's the racist relative sitting across the table at a family function, or the CEO blind to the institutional barriers to people of colour in the workplace, award-winning journalist and vivacious leader Antoinette Lattouf has some tips and advice on what to do. Unlike Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, it won't advise you not to 'criticise, condemn or complain' but instead explores the fallout when you do just that. With searing insights into the popularity contests you'll forgo, and how to decide which races are worth running -- and crucially which simply aren't worth time or energy.

Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Sociology - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Panteion University, Athen, course: Soziologie Bildung, language: English, abstract: The Pandemic, caused by the Virus Covid-19, is accompanied by school closures, social distancing measures and restricting the movement of people, goods and services, leading to stalled economies. „The UNESCO reported that the COVID 19 outbreak disrupted the education of at least 290.5 million students worldwide.“ (https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse) This leads to a gigantic educational crisis. While only few schools had the capacity to arrange a distance learning program for their students, not all of the students have the same chances on using it, depending on their social position. While this disruption to education and the expected reduction in global growth have far-reaching effects for all, their impact will be particularly adverse to the most disadvantaged students and their families, especially in poorer countries. Bourdieu, a representative for critical sociology, states that the social success is dependent on the starting requirements, the cultural capital. Critical sociologists see education as a means for perpetuating class. Using Bourdieu’s Theories on Cultural Capital and Inheritance and the Thesis of Coleman about Social Capital, I would like to point out, how education reproduces inequalities and stratification. Statistic insights of the PISA-Studies and Eurostat, support the arguments, to understand how the current global pandemic could affect education outcomes for years to overcome. From that point, the paper discusses on the Macro-Level, the relationship between the educational system and the economy, and what costs emerge through the loss of education caused by Covid-19, and it’s impact on the economic growth in the future.

This must-read new book maps New Zealand's alt-right underworld and unearths the roots of the occupation that ended in a violent protest on the grounds of Parliament. Speaking after the chaos of the protest that stopped the nation, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference, 'One day, it will be our job to try and understand how a group of people could succumb to such wild and dangerous mis- and disinformation.' That day isn't in the future. Mis- and disinformation had been identified as a problem before the convoy to parliament had even been suggested. While that protest looked like something that 'couldn't happen here', things that supposedly couldn't happen here seemed to be happening with alarming frequency. Three years prior, an armed gunman had entered two mosques in Christchurch and taken the lives of 51 worshipers, an event that shocked a country where mass shootings are almost unheard of. A few months later, a New Zealand Defence Force soldier who had founded a far-right group was arrested, and is awaiting court martial, accused of espionage. We are no longer living in ordinary times, where political violence is unimaginable, and conspiracy theorists are marginal figures whose ideas can be laughed at. How did things get to this point? Fear: New Zealand's Hostile Underworld of Extremists helps make sense of the tributaries feeding the river of alt-right activism, identifies the main perpetrators, and looks at why New Zealand is susceptible to misinformation, conspiracy theory and fear-mongering.

Social movements have often played an important role in emergencies, mobilising in defence of those rights that they perceive as being at risk or more urgently needed than ever. In general, progressive social movements develop in moments of intense change, mobilising with the aim of turning them to their advantage. the variable mix of challenges and opportunities related to a critical juncture. The specific balance of challenges and opportunities faced by progressive social movements during the Covid-19 crisis is a central question addressed in this volume. Based on existing research on the first phases of the pandemic Covid-19, this Element addresses the ways in with the health emergency had an impact on the repertoire of action, the organizational networks and the collective framing of progressive social movements that adapted to the pandemic conditions and the related crises, but also tried to transform them.

The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) conducts peer reviews of individual members once every five to six years. Reviews seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of members’ development co-operation, highlighting good practices and recommending improvements. Slovenia's official development assistance to Gross National Income ratio increased from 0.16% in 2017 to 0.19% in 2021, with a temporary uptick to 0.29% in 2022. This increase was mainly due to in-donor refugee costs related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. Slovenia punches above its weight as it influences decision-making in multilateral organisations in line with its priorities, notably on water and gender. Partners value its strong support to the Western Balkans, anchored in its European Union accession experience, as well as its support to demining efforts around the world. This peer review provides a set of recommendations to focus its approach, ensure cross-government co-ordination, match financial and human resources to ambitions, and build stronger relationships with partners.

Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Computer Sciences - Computational linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Trier (Computerlinguistik und Digital Humanities), language: English, abstract: In 2022, various socio-political debates regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war took place between German-speaking users on Twitter. Due to the large amount of daily user- generated tweets, the main goal of this master thesis is the development of an automatic cross-target stance detection model to enable an examination of German Twitter data on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict 2022. In the scope of this thesis, the BERT model is used and trained jointly on multiple-related targets of interest by encoding both tweet and target. Within this work, an auto-labeled dataset, a small manual-labeled test set and an unlabeled dataset with German tweets on four targets of interest are presented. A number of experiments with different BERT models are conducted studying cross-target generalization as well as the influence of class balance and case sensitivity. The best performing fine-tuned model is applied for automatic stance prediction on 2022 Twitter data. The stance prediction results are examined to detect potential reasons within a stance category. The results of this work show that with the applied cross-target approach reasonable performance on known targets can be achieved, but does not suffice for a successful cross-target transfer on unknown targets. In addition, it is observed that a balanced class distribution can counteract a bias towards an overrepresented class and results suggest that case-sensitivity is detrimental in stance detection. The classified data show a number of potential reasons for a favorable and opposing stance towards a respective target within the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Overall, the stance prediction results show that in 2022 there were consistently more German-speaking Twitter users in favor of supporting Ukraine in the conflict than those opposed to it.

Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with mass media and social media playing a key role, anti-vax protests have received sustained attention. The first comments often pointed at the heterogeneity of the events, whose participants seemed to belong to different milieus, from the far right to exoteric groups that opposed mainstream medicine, suggesting alternative ones. In reality, in their forms and claims, these protests developed as a regressive response to the health crisis. Conspiracist beliefs—from the politicized QAnon and Great Replacement conspiracies widespread on the far right to the Chemic Trails and 5G ones present in an exoteric milieu that promoted alternative health practices—were clearly expressed in the slogans and symbols used by the protestors. In different moments in different countries, the contestation of the anti-COVID-19 measures proceeded with picks and ebbs, following the waves of contagion and the related increase in policy measures to curve them. Increasing especially during the vaccination campaigns, they seemed to subside however quite quickly as the COVID-19 virus started to become endemic, with vaccination reducing its lethality. This volume builds upon social movement studies in the attempt to illuminate the dynamics of these protests in the various steps of their emergency, growth and decline. Referring to most recent developments in social movement studies, it in particular contributes to the analysis of contentious politics in emergency times, characterized by deep disruption in everyday life and rapid structural transformations in the society. In order to understand how specific strains are transformed into actions, it considers the opportunities and challenges for different actors in moments of intense mobilization in which different and contrasting claims are put forward. While these moments are rich in innovation, they built upon existing social movement infrastructures, that contribute to give meaning to dissatisfaction by proposing a shared definition of problems and solutions. Looking at the wave of anti-vax protests through the lenses of social movement studies, the analysis addresses the spread of the protests, their forms, but also their quick decline.