Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item WHY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS BECOME SUSTAINED: THE ROLE OF DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATION SURVIVAL(2021) Partridge, Diana M; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do some social movements become sustained while others fade away? Is it chance, the strength of the grievances, the type of claims, access to resources, or some other movement feature? Current social movement theory focuses on what sparks social movements rather than what sustains them. Yet arguably, social movements can achieve more profound and long-lasting change when they endure, while short-lived movements are more prone to bring about cosmetic change. This dissertation refocuses on how social movement organization (SMO) decision-making affects SMO sustainability. I argue that SMOs that use community-anchored decision-making processes are more adept at survival because these processes bolster the SMO’s legitimacy; foster interpersonal trust among activists; provide the SMO a modus operandi for how to continue operations during challenging times, and increase the changes the SMO has a contingency plan; and slow the onset of collective action burnout. These four mechanisms render SMOs more resilient to organizational disruption and deterrence from the authorities, increasing the likelihood of SMO survival. By contrast, SMOs that use decision-making processes unanchored in the community are more vulnerable to disruption and deterrence. Community-anchored decision-making processes are not synonymous with highly participatory movements, robust solidarity among activists, or even strong community. A movement can have all these features and still have unanchored decision-making processes, highlighting that not all strong communities are equal in their ability to sustain collective action. I test my hypotheses with case material from contemporary North African social movements. Based on dozens of interviews with social movement activists, journalists, academics, and officials; SMO statements; and government documents and secondary source material, I find strong support for the first and second hypotheses, moderate support for the third, and minimal support for the fourth. The results indeed suggest that SMOs’ decision-making processes affect their survival.Item “THE FIGHT IS YOURS”: ALLY ADVOCACY, IDENTITY RECONFIGURATION, AND POLITICAL CHANGE(2019) Howell, William; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since at least 1990, scholars and activists have used the term “ally” to describe and theorize a distinct sociopolitical role: someone from a majority identity group working to end that group’s oppression of another identity group. While the term is recent, “allies” are present throughout America’s constant struggle to actualize equality and justice. The identity-rooted ideologies that empowered allies disempowered the groups for and with whom they sought justice and equality. But those empowering identities were pieces, more or less salient, of complex intersectional people. Given the shared nature of identity, this process also necessarily pitted allies against those with whom they shared an identity. In this project, I ask two questions about past ally advocacy—questions that are often asked about contemporary ally advocacy. First, in moments of major civil rights reform, how did allies engage their own intersecting identities—especially those ideologically-charged identities with accrued power from generations of marginalizing and oppressing? Second, how did allies engage other identities that were not theirs—especially identities on whose oppression their privilege was built? In asking these two questions—about self-identity and others’ identity—I assemble numerous rhetorical fragments into “ally advocacy.” This bricolage is in recognition of rhetoric’s fragmentary nature, and in response to Michael Calvin McGee’s call to assemble texts for criticism. I intend to demonstrate that ally advocacy is such a text, manifesting (among other contexts) around the women’s suffrage amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the marriage equality movement. I argue that allies rarely engaged the ideologies underlying identity-based inequality in any open, direct, or thorough manner, especially at these moments when those ideologies were optimally vulnerable. I conclude that allies must accept that they marginalize others through identity and its adjacent ideology, and allies must help identity-group peers reconstitute their shared identity in recognition of this. Such reconstituting is necessary for a healthy American democracy but especially so in the late-2010s, as Americans persistently grapple with a political system fractured along identity lines.Item Emancipatory Hope: Reclaiming Black Social Movement Continuity(2019) Winstead, Kevin C; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the Freedom Songs to the Pullman Porters, African Americans have had to find ways to make collective use of the available means of communication for resistance, survival, and political organizing. The Movement for Black Lives carries on this tradition by using social media platforms, specifically Twitter. Accordingly, I asked: How do Black activists use Twitter to communicate ideas of hope and survival? Applying an adaption of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I examined Black activists’ constructions and utilization of hope for political action through shared artifacts of engagement across Twitter. By engaging both the interface of Twitter, its uses, and significant cultural practices along with a content analysis of Black activists’ online discussion, I identified the technocultural political framing of the current movement for Black lives. I argued that hope becomes a vehicle by which African Americans pass along strategies and tactics for liberation through technocultural practice. I conceptualized these findings as emancipatory hope, a utopian expectation of the collective capacity for dismantling race, class, and gender dominance. This research has implications for how we understand social movement theorizing by including a technoculture lens to the abeyance formation of social movement continuity theory.Item Freedom from the Market: Antagonistic Disruptions of Neoliberal Capitalism(2017) Slosarski, Yvonne Wanda; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 2016 U.S. presidential election showcased prominent rejections of the existing political and economic order, as many voters channeled frustrations over rising inequality and instability into support for candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who acknowledged the widespread economic struggles of the market globalization age. This recent electoral example is one of many global rejections of free market expansion, a phenomenon that my dissertation examines. While rhetorical scholars have addressed the growing prominence of the free market and its logics, my project examines how people have resisted what is often called neoliberalism. Taking an approach to rhetoric derived from theories of articulation, in this project, I define neoliberalism as a hegemonic articulation that strings together four governing principles: freedom as primary, economics as natural, the individual as rational actor, and the free market as pure. The project examines three activist discourses that challenged neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s and that continue to resonate today: the 1986 U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Economic Justice for All pastoral letter, the Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal of 1996, and Seattle’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests. With each case, I demonstrate how neoliberal discourses themselves fostered tensions and how people exploited these tensions to challenge neoliberal hegemony; following theories of articulation, I call these challenges “antagonisms.” This project suggests that we should understand activist moments as “antagonistic disruptions” that that interrupt hegemonic discourses and evoke the possibility of their demise. Taken together, these case studies offer three major lessons for scholars and activists. First, the project suggests that powerful discourses—like neoliberalism—are comprised of necessary tensions, and that scholars can identify those tensions and that activists can exploit them. Second, the dissertation teaches scholars and activists that existing discourses and previous antagonisms enable people to challenge powerful discourses. Thus, scholars and activists learn that antagonisms are disruptive when they participate in legible frames of reference. Third, the cases suggest that the more multi-modal and frequent the antagonistic engagement, the more forceful the disruption. This project then, recommends that scholars study multi-modal recurrence and that activists strive for multi-modal consistency.Item GLOBAL ISLAM IN THE AGE OF CIVIL SOCIETY: TRANSNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY, RELIGION, AND POWER(2012) Atalay, Zeynep; Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the instrumental benefits of civil society discourse for Muslim civil society organizations and their pursuit of conservative agendas. Since early 1990, informal religious communities in the Muslim world have been reestablishing themselves as formal NGOs at unprecedented rates. Additionally, they are joining forces and forming transnational coalitions. The constituents' goals of religious support and solidarity remain unchanged in terms of their commitment to conservative and religious norms. By contrast, existing transnational civil society literature is dominated with assumptions of liberal and secular agendas. Yet, despite the seemingly inherent contradiction, the members of these faith-based organizations and coalitions persistently position themselves within the sphere of civil society. This dissertation problematizes this conflict and asks: Why are the previously informal Islamist networks adopting the discourse of civil society, transforming into formal NGOs, and establishing transnational coalitions? In this study, I examine one of the largest Muslim NGO coalitions to date - the Union of the NGOs of the Islamic World (UNIW). With its 193 member NGOs from 46 countries, the UNIW aims to consolidate faith-based Muslim NGOs and to coordinate member actions for the welfare of Muslim communities around the world. Based on fieldwork conducted in Turkey, Germany, the U.S., Malaysia and Cambodia, I employ qualitative and ethnographic methods and draw on diverse sources of data including in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis. My findings suggest that framing this transnational religious solidarity project as a transnational civil society network provides Islamist groups additional channels of power. Specifically, previously informal communities find opportunities to increase their social capital through membership in a transnational coalition, engage in mutually profitable relationships with states, and claim legitimacy as global political actors. The empirical findings of the dissertation challenge several assumptions of the constructivist and sociological institutionalist literature. These perspectives' contributions to the study of transnational advocacy networks, international NGOs, and transnational NGO coalitions have prioritized ideational and normative concerns over instrumental and interest-based motivations in transnational non-state actor politics. In this dissertation I argue that ideational motivations of transnational non-state actors regularly intersect with instrumental concerns. By demonstrating the instrumental motivations of norm-oriented networks, this dissertation moves beyond the instrumental/ideational divide that permeates the literature on transnational non-state actors.Item UNPACKING INCLUSION, TRACING POLITICAL VIOLENCE: A CASE STUDY OF THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY AND HAMAS`S GOVERNANCE UNDER OCCUPATION(2011) Al-Madbouh, Ghada; Butterworth, Charles E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation seeks to unpack inclusion and to trace a causal path by which a certain type of inclusion (exclusive inclusion) is linked to the deployment of political violence by incorporated opposition. In doing so, I challenge the assumptions of the inclusion-moderation nexus and its applicability to less institutionalized competitive authoritarianism. I undertake in-depth comparative case studies in two sectors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the Civil Security Sector (CSS) and the Palestinian Security Sector (PSS), where evidence shows that the inclusion of Hamas led to political violence rather than moderation. Based on this study I argue that unpacking inclusion into two components, namely open contestation and ostensible power sharing, is essential to account for the complex interactions between authority-incorporated groups and political violence. Open contestation and ostensible power sharing lead to various levels of what I call ―exclusive inclusion‖ in the CSS and the PSS (and in all institutions). Exclusive inclusion captures Fatah incumbents‘ formal and informal practices and manipulations, along with colonial policies and external interferences. Second, I argue that exclusive inclusion triggers two major internal dimensions - the intermixed approach of incorporated opposition and the intra-group divergence – which significantly shape the deployment of political violence. Improved conditions of exclusive inclusion brought some entitlements back to Hamas‘s officials in the CSS over time and left some margin for them to practice their intermixed approach (resistance and accommodation with authorities). This occurred while increasingly exclusive inclusion and denial of Hamas‘s demands in the PSS not only made the continuous exercise of an intermixed approach from within the PA unfeasible, but also led to divergences among currents inside Hamas. Third, intra-Hamas divergences mean the development of various trends within Hamas, despite its unity, each of which had developed different attributions of threats and expected payoffs of exclusive inclusion in the PSS. In conclusion, the continuous exclusive inclusion in the PSS, along with intradivergences and the absence of power arrangement outside the security institution, were fertile opportunities for the deployment of political violence against PSS. However, contingent events under sanctions, led to the extension of violence and takeover of the Strip.