Collective action mitigates the negative effects of COVID-19 threat and anti-abortion restrictions on mental health

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic changed our lives in many different domains, forcing people to adapt to countrywide lockdowns, school shutdowns, and business closures. The burden of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted also in deterioration of mental health. At the same time, political conflicts and social inequalities was reinforced and many people engaged in demonstrations to fight for their rights. This study examines whether collective acting for an important cause during the pandemic might mitigate the impact of both political tension related to anti-abortion restrictions and COVID-19 threats on mental health.

METHODS

We conducted a two-wave study with a representative sample of the Polish population, investigating the effect of participating in Polish pro-choice demonstrations on depressive and anxiety symptoms.

RESULTS

Participating in protests attenuated the negative effects of COVID-19 threat and anti-abortion restrictions on mental health. Moreover, we found that the feeling of solidarity with other demonstrators and sense of agency derived from such demonstrations led to lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms.

CONCLUSION

The results of the study indicate that participating in meaningful and value-oriented collective action may serve as a buffer against the detrimental effects of social and health threats.

Messaging inclusion with consequence: U.S. sanctuary cities and immigrant wellbeing

In the United States (U.S.), sanctuary cities have increasingly garnered public attention as places dedicated to increasing immigrant safety, inclusion, and health. These cities primarily rely on limiting local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement to deter immigrant detention and deportation. However, sanctuary policies' inability to extend immigrants' legal rights and their reliance on police as ushers of sanctuary may complicate how these spaces attend to their stated goals. In this paper, we examine how organizational workers conceptualize sanctuary, safety, and immigrant health and wellbeing within sanctuary cities. We draw on interviews with organizational workers in two sanctuary cities: Boston, Massachusetts and Seattle, Washington collected between February and August 2018. Our findings reveal that immigrants continue to face structural barriers to housing, safe employment, education, and healthcare within sanctuary cities with consequences to wellbeing. Workers' definitions of safety draw on interconnected structural exclusion that prevent immigrants from accessing basic needs and fail to account for historically rooted forms of racism and nativism. Organizational workers identified tensions between messages of sanctuary and what local sanctuary policies offer in practice, providing insight into consequences of institutionalizing a grassroots social movement. As organizational workers negotiate these tensions, they must develop everyday sanctuary practices to extend immigrant inclusion, safety, health, and wellbeing.

"That's what we think of as activism": Solidarity through care in queer Desi diaspora

This article examines a framing of solidarity as both activism and community care work in diasporic South Asian (sometimes referred to as "Desi") communities in the US and the UK. From the vantage point of the researcher as a pansexual Indian-American activist herself, this article draws conclusions based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted with lesbian, gay, queer, and trans activists during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black-led uprisings against police and state violence in the US and the UK. These conversations and this article particularly examine the participation of Desi activists and their peers in these movements, and their explorations of different modes of solidarity, from joint struggle to allyship to coconspiratorship and community transformation. They ultimately argue that queerness in Desi diaspora fosters solidarity through care that nurtures relationships across and between the diverse groups that make up LGBTQ + communities and the Desi diaspora, as well as between Desi, Black, and other racialized and diasporic communities. By examining lesbian, gay, trans, and broadly queer South Asian activists' relationships to each other and to other racialized groups in struggle, this article conceptualizes a framing of solidarity and Black and Brown liberation together that transcends difference, transphobia and TERFism, and anti-Blackness through centering kinship and care. Through the intimacies borne out of months and years on the frontlines of struggle together, this article argues that deepening an understanding of activism, kinship, and care together in Desi diasporic organizing is key to building a solidarity that imagines and moves toward new and liberated worlds.

The hybrid political role of feminism on Twitter during COVID-19: SISMA Mujer in Colombia

Twitter proved to be strategic for the dissemination of information, and for the activation of feminist social movements. This article identifies the patterns of representation around feminist movements on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed the discourse around a Colombian NGO known as Sisma Mujer, in a corpus of 4415 tweets posted during the first year of COVID-19. The results showed five significant topic categories: gender-based violence, women in peacebuilding, women's human rights, gender equality, and social protest. This activity re-contextualized the online activism of this movement into a new, hybrid role with important political implications for the social movement. Our analysis highlights this role by pointing out how feminist activists framed gender-based violence to generate a discourse on Twitter.

Organized Care as Antidote to Organized Violence: An Engaged Clinical Ethnography of the Los Angeles County Jail System

The field of medical action extends beyond the clinical encounter. Rather, clinical encounters are organized by wider regimes of governance and expertise, and broader geographies of care, abandonment and violence. Clinical encounters in penal institutions condense and render visible the fundamental situatedness of all clinical care. This article considers the complexity of clinical action in carceral institutions and their wider geographies through an examination of the crisis of mental health care in jails, an issue of significant public concern in the United States and much of the world. We present findings from our engaged, collaborative clinical ethnography, which was informed by and seeking to inform already existing collective struggles. Revisiting the concept of "pragmatic solidarity" (Farmer in Partner to the poor: a Paul Farmer reader, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010) in an era of "carceral humanitarianism" (Gilmore in Futures of Black Radicalism, Verso, New York, 2017, see also Kilgore in Repackaging mass incarceration, Counterpunch, June 6-8, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/06/repackaging-mass-incarceration/ , 2014), we draw on theorists who consider prisons to be institutions of "organized violence" (Gilmore and Gilmore in: Heatherton and Camp (eds) Policing the planet: why the policing crisis led to Black lives matter, Verso, New York, 2016). We argue that clinicians may have an important role in joining struggles for "organized care" that can counter institutions of organized violence.

Struggles Against Mining in Brazil: Framing Disputes and Tensions in Civil Society

This paper seeks to characterise the relationship between civil society and mining in Minas Gerais, Brazil, between 2000 and 2020 by observing the actions of three different groups in resisting the expansion of mining. The analysis points to the existence of a plurality of forms of engagement, organisation and ways of establishing relations between civil society and the state and the market. It also reveals tension between different ways of framing the mining problem by civil society, of posing this problem publicly and establishing ways to confront it. Three sets of actors are identified: (i) environmental NGOs, who are market-oriented; (ii) groups with looser ties who are more radical; and (iii) social movements aligned with the identities of a state-orientated traditional left. My analysis suggests that the divergence in framing the context by these three different groups hinders the construction of a substantive public debate on the mining issue in Brazil. The article is divided into three parts. First, it briefly outlines the process of mining expansion in Brazil, starting in the mid-2000s, highlighting its economic impact. Second, it considers the relationship between civil society articulation and deliberation. Third, it characterises the constitution of these different civil society groups who have established interactions with market and state actors that fostered this expansion.

Protest participation propensity cues and selective recruitment: Dyadic evidence on rational prospecting

Who takes to the streets to protest matters. Protest sends signals to decision-makers and biased participation leads to biased signals. This paper examines one driver of biased participation, namely protest recruiters behaving as rational prospectors by only inviting others who they believe are likely to agree to the participation request. Extant evidence on rational prospecting is indirect as it draws on data collected among recruits. In contrast, this study employs a direct and dyadic data approach whereby potential recruiters for a labor movement demonstration in Belgium are asked, before the protest takes place, about the political viewpoints of specific others (alters) in their network, and then which alters they have invited to participate. After the event, the same respondents are asked for each alter whether they actually participated. We find that the perceived likelihood that an alter would participate in the event exerts a consistent effect on the actual recruitment effort towards that person. Moreover, recruiters' perception that an individual is recruitable is mostly accurate; those perceived to have a high propensity to participate are more likely to take part, regardless of being recruited. Most importantly, our findings show that in the case of a labor union demonstration, prospectors evaluate alters who are co-workers differently compared to other types of social ties.

The vegan dilemma: Do peaceful protests worsen attitudes to veganism?

A body of research has shown that violent protests reduce support for social movements. However, few studies have examined whether the same is true for protests which are peaceful, yet disruptive (e.g., blocking traffic). Across two pre-registered experimental studies, we explored whether pro-vegan protests that are depicted as causing social disruption lead to more negative attitudes towards veganism, compared to non-disruptive protests or a control condition. Study 1 utilised a combined sample of Australian and United Kingdom residents (N = 449; M_age = 24.7 years). Study 2 employed a larger sample of undergraduate Australian students (N = 934; M_age = 19.8 years). In Study 1, disruptive protests were associated with more negative attitudes towards vegans, but only among women. In Study 2, no such effect was found. Instead, a significant main effect was found for the protest's cause (vegan vs. fast fashion), but not protest type (disruptive vs. non-disruptive). That is, reading about a vegan protest, irrespective of how disruptive it was, led to worse attitudes towards vegans, and greater defense of meat consumption (i.e., endorsement of meat eating as natural, necessary, and normal), than reading about a control protest. This effect was mediated by the perceived immorality of the protestors, and, in turn, reduced identification with them. Taking together both studies, the purported location of the protest (i.e., domestic vs. overseas) did not significantly impact attitudes toward the protestors. The current findings suggest that depictions of vegan protests elicit worse attitudes toward this movement, regardless of how peaceful that protest may be. Future research is needed to examine whether other forms of advocacy can ameliorate negative reactions to vegan activism.

Resources that Help Sustain Environmental Volunteer Activist Leaders

Environmental activism organizations depend on recruiting and retaining individuals willing to engage in leadership tasks on a voluntary basis. This study examined the resources which help or hinder sustained environmental volunteer activist leadership behaviors. Interviews with 21 environmental volunteer activist leaders were analyzed within a Resource Mobilization Theory framework. While six resources supporting sustained engagement in volunteer activist leadership behaviors were identified, only three were sought by all participants: time, community support, and social relationships. Money, volunteers and network connections were considered valuable resources, however their acquisition generated significant additional administrative burdens. Social relationships sustained volunteer activist leaders through fostering feelings of positive emotions connected with the group. We conclude with suggestions for organizations seeking to increase retention of activist volunteer leaders: namely larger organizations sharing their resources to reduce administrative demands on volunteer activist leaders in smaller organizations; developing movement infrastructure groups to build and sustain networks; and the prioritization of positive relationships within volunteer teams.

"The freshness of irreverence": learning from ACT UP toward sociopolitical action in science education

This article explores ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) through a Freirean lens of critical consciousness, dialogue, and transformation. The purpose is to draw from where there have been processes of engagement of sociopolitical action in science and how these spaces can become meaningful entry points to take toward making a "sociopolitical turn" in science education, as well as in science more broadly. Current practices in science education do not adequately prepare educators and students to challenge and interrupt injustices that we are emersed in. ACT UP is a well-studied example of when non-specialists engaged with science and scientific knowledge making to shift power and policy. Paulo Freire's pedagogy was developed alongside social movements. By examining ACT UP through a Freirean lens, I explore themes of relationality, social epistemology, consensus, and dissensus that emerged when a social movement engaged with science to achieve its goal. My intent is to add to the ongoing dialogues of approaching science education as a practice of critical consciousness and liberatory world making.

"Welcome to the Revolution": Promoting Generational Renewal in Argentina's Ni Una Menos

Despite the global upsurge of youth-fueled mass mobilization, the critical question of why new generations may be eager to join established movements is under-explored theoretically and empirically. This study contributes to theories of feminist generational renewal in particular. We examine the longer-term movement context and more proximate strategies that have enabled young women to participate steadily in a cycle of protest, alongside more seasoned activists, due to a process of feminist learning and affective bonding that we call "productive mediation." We focus on the Argentine Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) massive yearly march, which, since its onset in 2015, demonstrates that feminist activists have achieved the sought-after goal of fostering a highly diverse mass movement. These large-scale mobilizations against feminicide and gender-based violence gain much of their energy from a strong youth contingent, so much so that they have been called "the Daughters' Revolution." We show that these "daughters" have been welcomed by previous generations of feminist changemakers. Drawing on original qualitative research featuring 63 in-depth interviews with activists of different ages, backgrounds, and locations across Argentina, we find that long-standing movement spaces and brokers, as well as innovative frameworks of understanding, repertoires of action, and organizational approaches, help to explain why preexisting social movements may be attractive for young participants.

Leveraging collective action and environmental literacy to address complex sustainability challenges

Developing and enhancing societal capacity to understand, debate elements of, and take actionable steps toward a sustainable future at a scale beyond the individual are critical when addressing sustainability challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic disease. Although mounting evidence exists for how to facilitate individual action to address sustainability challenges, there is less understanding of how to foster collective action in this realm. To support research and practice promoting collective action to address sustainability issues, we define the term "collective environmental literacy" by delineating four key potent aspects: scale, dynamic processes, shared resources, and synergy. Building on existing collective constructs and thought, we highlight areas where researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can support individuals and communities as they come together to identify, develop, and implement solutions to wicked problems. We close by discussing limitations of this work and future directions in studying collective environmental literacy.

[Counter-Experts: Environment, Activism and the Regional Epistemologies of Social Movements]

With the demand for "counter-knowledge" in the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, "counter-experts" became an integral part of politics. In the field of environmental activism, counter-experts were particularly well represented in regions and agglomerations with high levels of industrial pollution. This essay argues that awareness correlated with a mode of knowledge production that was typical for the environmental sciences in the twentieth century. The history of the environmental sciences throughout that period was shaped by regional epistemologies, often emerging in the context of large-scale infrastructural projects. Many counter-experts therefore had strong ties with the field of the environmental sciences. The article traces three influential counter-experts in the Frankfurt Main region by 1980: the pastor Kurt Oeser; scientific green activist Jutta Ditfurth; and the project of a "social natural science" related to the Darmstadt philosopher Gernot Böhme.

Mental health, availability to participate in social change, and social movement accessibility

People with illnesses and disabilities routinely face obstacles to political participation, including participation in social movements. Conventional social movement studies primarily theorize impediments to social movement participation in terms of personal constraints, as implied by the term "biographical (un)availability." However, studies in disability, health, and illness resist locating disability-related constraints solely within the individual, pushing fields to ask how environments can be disabling in and of themselves. Thus, by extending social movement theory through this Disabled/Crip/Mad lens, this article attempts to balance the notion of personal biographical availability or constraints with the notion of what the author calls "movement accessibility." Drawing on data from almost ∼130 respondents, this article develops a framework for understanding how movement accessibility might be deepened within social movement contexts.

Transnational AIDS networks, regional solidarities and the configuration of meti in Nepal

This paper critically examines the role of transnational AIDS networks and resources in the consolidation of one of the earliest identity categories, meti, used within an emerging Nepali LGBT movement in the early 2000s. It argues that political identity formation in resource-poor contexts with limited domestic support for queer organising has been a cumulative effect of transnational exchanges between activists and resource networks. Beyond this, the paper traces the emergence and changing meanings of meti to show how a seemingly Indigenous category is more closely linked to modern configurations of male same-sex sexuality in response to opportunities available for political mobilisation. The paper is based on secondary research and interviews with 71 participants and participant observation conducted during seven months of fieldwork in Nepal, and interviews conducted outside the country between 2016 and 2019.

Taking up the tiki torch: Understanding alt-right interest using internet search data

The alt-right is a white supremacist social movement that operates primarily online. Its broader constituency has not been studied systematically. Participants in white supremacist movements tend to join in response to threats to their social and economic status. Quantitative work suggests they come primarily from working- and lower-middle class backgrounds. Alt-right leadership, however, argues their movement successfully mobilizes a more affluent population of college-educated professionals. In this paper, we examine predictors of county-level Internet search volume for alt-right content. Results indicate that counties with larger percentages of college graduates, of highly educated non-white and immigrant groups, and higher poverty levels for college graduates tend to have a higher search volume for alt-right content. We interpret this as evidence that the alt-right appeals to college-educated whites experiencing real or perceived threats to their economic and social status.

Empowering Inclusion? The Two Sides of Party-Society Linkages in Latin America

This article investigates why, in two different political and institutional contexts, leftist governing parties became agents of empowered inclusion, boosting the capacity of subordinate social actors to shape the agenda of politics and allowing them to push social policy in an inclusionary direction. To explain how and why this happened, it highlights the ambiguous nature of party-society linkages. While societal ties are necessary for sustained significant progress in social and political inclusion, they can also block the later consolidation of achievements. This happens as some groups, once included, block further inclusion. We build our theoretical argument about the two-sided nature of party-society linkages using comparative evidence from Bolivia and Uruguay-two countries where progress toward empowered inclusion has been especially notable in the past two decades. The article contributes to existing scholarship on social and political inclusion by calling for greater attention to the critical but, at times, ambiguous role that the social bases of parties play.

Fighting Food Waste by Law: Making Sense of the Chinese Approach

The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress adopted the Anti-food Waste Law of the People's Republic of China in April 2021 to guarantee grain security, conserve resources, and protect the environment. We pursue three research questions: Why has China implemented a law with sanctions to reduce food waste, and why now? Why does the law target the catering industry? To answer these questions, we collected primary data through semi-structured interviews with government officials, as well as secondary data through recorded interviews available online with officials of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC) and food waste activists, as well as NPCSC conference reports. We find a legal approach with sanctions was necessary since cultural aspects, specifically conventional Chinese dining habits and pop culture, are difficult to regulate through instruments without sanctions. In addition, we find the Chinese law focuses on the catering industry for a few reasons: (1) More waste is generated by the catering industry than households, (2) waste from the catering industry is easier to monitor than household waste, and (3) this was a response to citizen requests collected during the Anti-food Waste Law public consultation process.

Sexual Identities and Reactions to Black Lives Matter

INTRODUCTION

This study traced sexuality differences in Black Lives Matter (BLM) approval before using theories of "political distinctiveness" to explain why sexuality differences occurred.

METHODS

A random sample of 3489 US adults completed the 2016 wave of the American National Election Survey (ANES) Time Series project. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions assessed differences in BLM support by reported sexual identity when adjusting for possibly relevant covariates.

RESULTS

Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGB) backed BLM more than heterosexuals. Increased LGB support of BLM was driven by sexuality differences in racial backgrounds, marital statuses, perceptions of police biases, approval of Black empowerment, authoritarianism, and emotional bonds to people of color.

CONCLUSIONS

Sexual identities shape reactions to antiracist social movements. LGB alignment with BLM is partly due to sexual discrepancies in demographic qualities, group memberships, and the way sexual identities alter an awareness of social biases.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Greater LGB liberalism, plus the queer friendly nature of BLM, offers greater prospects in the creation and maintenance of intersectional social justice movements that seek to improve the lives of racial and sexual minorities.

Decoloniality as the Only Pathway to the Right to Development in Latin America

This article seeks to discuss the severe economic and social impacts caused in the region by the development model in place as well as proposals for transformation advanced by different Latin American social movements. This is not a scholarly article, but rather a set of reflections gained from extensive reading and years of political activism carried out in Brazil, in the region, and worldwide. Nor is this article exhaustive; rather it consists of ideas that may contribute to the debate surrounding the right to development.

The contested meaning of "long COVID" - Patients, doctors, and the politics of subjective evidence

In our article, we reconstruct how the patient-made term "long COVID" was able to become a widely accepted concept in public discourses. While the condition was initially invisible to the public eye, we show how the mobilization of subjective evidence online, i.e., the dissemination of reports on the different experiences of lasting symptoms, was able to transform the condition into a crucial feature of the coronavirus pandemic. We explore how stakeholders used the term "long COVID" in online media and in other channels to create their illness and group identity, but also to demarcate the personal experience and experiential knowledge of long COVID from that of other sources. Our exploratory study addresses two questions. Firstly, how the mobilization of subjective evidence leads to the recognition of long COVID and the development of treatment interventions in medicine; and secondly, what distinguishes these developments from other examples of subjective evidence mobilization. We argue that the long COVID movement was able to fill crucial knowledge gaps in the pandemic discourses, making long COVID a legitimate concern of official measures to counter the pandemic. By first showing how illness experiences were gathered that defied official classifications of COVID-19, we show how patients made the "long COVID" term. Then we compare the clinical and social identity of long COVID to that of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), before we examine the social and epistemic processes at work in the digital and medial discourses that have transformed how the pandemic is perceived through the lens of long COVID. Building on this, we finally demonstrate how the alignment of medical professionals as patients with the movement has challenged the normative role of clinical evidence, leading to new forms of medical action to tackle the pandemic.

Disinformed social movements: A large-scale mapping of conspiracy narratives as online harms during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic caused high uncertainty regarding appropriate treatments and public policy reactions. This uncertainty provided a perfect breeding ground for spreading conspiratorial anti-science narratives based on disinformation. Disinformation on public health may alter the population’s hesitance to vaccinations, counted among the ten most severe threats to global public health by the United Nations. We understand conspiracy narratives as a combination of disinformation, misinformation, and rumour that are especially effective in drawing people to believe in post-factual claims and form disinformed social movements. Conspiracy narratives provide a pseudo-epistemic background for disinformed social movements that allow for self-identification and cognitive certainty in a rapidly changing information environment. This study monitors two established conspiracy narratives and their communities on Twitter, the anti-vaccination and anti-5G communities, before and during the first UK lockdown. The study finds that, despite content moderation efforts by Twitter, conspiracy groups were able to proliferate their networks and influence broader public discourses on Twitter, such as #Lockdown in the United Kingdom.

Future Protest Made Risky: Examining Social Media Based Civil Unrest Prediction Research and Products

Social media has both been hailed for enabling social movements and critiqued for its affordances as a surveillance infrastructure. In this work, I focus on the latter by analyzing research, products, and discourses around the recent history of civil unrest prediction based on social media data and other public data sources, thereby giving insights into current and often opaque protest surveillance and forecasting practices. Technologies to monitor individuals and groups online have been developed for instance to predict US protests following the election of President Trump in 2016 and labor strikes across global supply chains. These works are part of an emerging computer science research field focused on "civil unrest prediction" dedicated to forecasting protests across the globe (e.g., Indonesia, Brazil, and Australia). Foremost I focus on scholarly literature as my unit of analysis, but also other artifacts discussing or detailing applications for companies, organizations or governments are examined. I provide a conceptualization of civil unrest prediction technology by illustrating data sources, features and methods used, and how prediction and detection are necessarily entangled. Then I show how various kinds of unrest activity are framed as risks to be fixed or averted for various actors with differing interests such as the military, law enforcement, and various industries. Finally, I critically unpack justifications and ascribed benefits of the technology and point to how the perspectives of protestors are almost completely absent. My analysis shows a critical need for regulation centering activists and workers, and reflection within academia, particularly in the fields of computer and data science, on the ethics and politics of protest research and ensuing technological applications.

Boundary politics and the social imaginary for sustainable food systems

In this essay, Kim Niewolny, current President of AFHVS, responds to the 2020 AFHVS Presidential Address given by Molly Anderson. Niewolny is encouraged by Anderson's message of moving "beyond the boundaries" by focusing our gaze on the insurmountable un-sustainability of the globalized food system. Anderson recommends three ways forward to address current challenges. Niewolny argues that building solidarity with social justice movements and engendering anti-racist praxis take precedence. This work includes but is not limited to dismantling the predominance of neoliberal-fueled technocratic productivism in agricultural science and policy while firmly centering civil society collective action and human rights frameworks as our guiding imaginary for racial, gender, environmental, and climate justice possibilities for sustainable food systems praxis. She concludes by exploring the epistemic assertion to push beyond our professional and political imaginaries to build a more fair, just, and humanizing food system.

Year 2020: How Will It Impact Identities of Children and Youth over Time?

In this Editorial, as the Guest Editor to the Special Issue on Youth Identity, I reflect on the year 2020. The year was a challenging one in relation to the global impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the continued inequities and systemic injustices faced by racialized populations. As an intersectionality-informed identity researcher, I argue that because of the complexity of our individual and collective identities, identity scholarship is not limited to a particular discipline, or theory, or methodology.

AFHVS 2020 presidential address: pushing beyond the boundaries

In this 2020 AFHVS Presidential Address, Molly Anderson suggests that we must push beyond the boundaries imposed by our training, institutional reward systems, political system and comfort zones in order to solve global challenges. She lists five challenges facing those who are trying to build more sustainable food systems: overcoming the technocratic and productivist approach of industrial agriculture, avoiding future pandemics, restoring degraded and depleted systems and resources, remaining united as a movement while creating collaborations with other movements, and redistributing power across food system actors so that everyone can realize their human rights, including the right to food. She describes three ways that she has found to be effective in pushing beyond boundaries: international collaborations, interactions with global social movements, and anti-racist work. She links these "moments" of opportunity back to the five challenges, and concludes with advice to young scholars.

[COVID-19, routine dynamics and reflexivity of structure. On the eventful change of Fridays for Future's protest forms]

This contribution focuses on the dis/continuity of routines at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is conceived as a nexus of multiple, intertwined crises of action and interaction (ÖZS special issue 2016, 41/1). Instead of understanding crisis as an external facticity, i.e., external cause of change, we argue that actors negotiate crisis in sociomaterial processes within historically specific contexts. Taking up the debate in organizational studies on the conception and description of intentional change, this article adds a reflection on intentional routine changes in times of crises. In methodological terms, the article connects routine dynamics with the perspective of eventful sociology. Eventful sociology emphasizes that sociomaterial negotiations of routines can unfold to more far-reaching structural changes and therefore calls for a rigorous temporal description along paths. Based on the results of a process-oriented ethnographic study of Fridays for Future Vienna, the article identifies two conditional moments (normative-discursive and material-bodily) through which structure is made reflexive. Finally, the pursued understanding of reflexivity is embedded in the debate on the (world)risk society.

Social movements and the contested institutional identity of the hospital

Taking popular protest as a common reaction to changes in hospital services as its point of departure, this paper explores how a social movement has taken on the issue of the hospital as an institution. In the wake of the transformation of Norwegian public hospitals into health enterprises (trusts), this paper explores community resistance to the proposals and plans of decision-makers to restructure hospitals. The study is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the website/blog for the local hospital movement's activities from 2007 until 2017 and of its involvement and resistance in respect of three instances of proposed change to the hospital structure during this period. The study reveals that the health enterprises and the managerialism they represent pose a threat to individual safety and sense of belonging, and to the preservation and identity of the local community. Moreover, the framing of the cause of the local hospital movement illuminates how the institutional identity of the hospital is highly contested between the institutional categories of 'public administration' on the one hand, and 'the company' on the other. The impact of the local hospital movement has proven modest in terms of influencing and reversing decisions to restructure hospitals, but it has been considerable in terms of cultural support for its concepts and values, not just concerning hospitals and health care services, but also with regard to democratic governance.

[Community life for all: mental health, participation and autonomy. SESPAS Report 2020]

The objective of this article is to critically reflect on the participation in community of people with a diagnosis of mental disorder from a human rights and community health perspective. Firstly, we review basic concepts such as community mental health and the meaning of participation, which is understood as an end and not as a mean. It is important to increase the participation of people with a diagnosis in community spaces beyond the classic circuit of mental health care. This implies to create and share knowledge in a collective, horizontal and consensual way among all the people involved, especially the diagnosed people themselves. Secondly, the experience of the group of women of Radio Nikosia is narrated in first person by the participants themselves. The main highlights of the group are its horizontality, flexibility, and that is a self-organized space outside the health system where it is possible to express oneself without fear of being judged. Processes of trust, recognition, joy, social support and health are generated. Members of the group meet fortnightly and discuss on different topics chosen by them, and take part in political actions for women's own rights such as participation in the media, in feminist calls, in training and talks. We exemplify that other ways of doing community mental health are possible. The challenges are to make them visible, to systemize them and to be able to assess the impact they have on the health not only of the participants, but also the community.

Epidemiological rage: Population, biography, and state responsibility in trans- health activism

This article examines how social movements reconceptualized trans-health in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Looking ethnographically to medical and activist practice, the article analyzes "epidemiological biographies", or activist-produced community-based studies blending quantitative and narrative data. It draws on population health, feminist science studies, transgender studies, and social theory to discuss the circulation and implications of these publications. Specifically, it describes how epidemiological biographies disputed health behavioral models by defining state violence and criminalization as primary conditions endangering health and life expectancy among travestis and trans-people. The article analyzes how activist researchers made state violence legible through logics of population health, even as the concept of "population" also emerged from techniques of state control. In contrast with models that place individual behavior at the locus of health interventions, activists instead advanced interventions that contested state securitization and shifted resource distribution. Epidemiological biographies had a considerable effect on national trans-health politics, providing an evidentiary basis for several regulatory shifts. These studies emerged in part through collective political action that reformulated dominant modes of statistical aggregation. This statistical turn-which I call "statistical collectivization"-produced contradictory effects. At one level, it obscured differential conditions of criminalization and violence. At another, it directed attention to the markedly racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered forms of subjugation that materialize in landscapes of trans-health, and prioritized materially distributive regulation over and above civil protections. Through these contradictory actions, social movements reformulated dominant notions of health by challenging state securitization and contesting state power.

Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health

Within the proliferation of studies identified with global mental health, anthropologists rarely take global mental health itself as their object of inquiry. The papers in this special issue were selected specifically to problematize global mental health. To contextualize them, this introduction critically weighs three possible genealogies through which the emergence of global health can be explored: (1) as a divergent thread in the qualitative turn of global health away from earlier international health and development; (2) as the product of networks and social movements; and (3) as a diagnostically- and metrics-driven psychiatric imperialism, reinforced by pharmaceutical markets. Each paper tackles a different component of the assemblage of global mental health: knowledge production and circulation, global mental health principles enacted in situ, and subaltern modalities of healing through which global mental health can be questioned. Pluralizing anthropology, the articles include research sites in meeting rooms, universities, research laboratories, clinics, healers and health screening camps, households, and the public spaces of everyday life, in India, Ghana, Brazil, Senegal, South Africa, Kosovo and Palestine, as well as in US and European institutions that constitute nodes in the global network through which scientific knowledge and certain models of mental health circulate.

Safe Enough to Share: Setting the Dementia Agenda Online

CSCW research is increasingly interested in the ways that people use technology to discuss health and disability online. In addition to studying how people share information and seek and provide emotional support, a growing area of interest is health activism. In this paper, we analyze how a project centered around sharing "real and raw" experiences with dementia provides a safe platform for people to share their authentic experiences. These accounts counter predominant depictions of dementia and push back on tokenistic involvement of people with this condition. In a study involving observations and interviews with members of this project, we find that people with dementia must negotiate several goals which at times compete with each other: sharing a "real and raw" look at dementia, changing attitudes, showcasing a polished presentation, and inhabiting a safe space. The paper concludes with a discussion of future directions for CSCW on configuring a space for dialogue on sensitive topics, health activism, and sharing online with dementia.

Lobbying by association: The case of autism and the controversy over packing therapy in France

The controversy over packing therapy used in psychiatry was studied here to illustrate how leading associations can influence public health policies. The main French associations of parents with autistic children succeeded in obtaining the prohibition of packing, announced by the French Secretary of State to the Ministry of Health in April 2016. Parents and professionals who had observed the positive effects of packing when nothing else worked for their part wondered what could be done for self-harming patients. The political authorities followed the opinion of the main associations of parents with autistic children at the expense of that of professionals. In this paper, the actions and discourse of the associations against packing are explored, as are the arguments of the psychiatrists who defend packing therapy. The different phases in the controversy from the first opposition in 2005 and the role of opinion leaders in associations are analyzed. The strategies to discredit psychiatry and to promote behavioral methods are also studied to understand the shift in the balance of power from professionals to association leaders. The mobilization of the associations prompted some psychiatrists to conduct evidence-based research and to formalize their practice. The controversy over packing, involving political decision-making processes, ethical issues and clinical questions, enables us to illustrate a case of lobbying by associations.

Santo Domingo's LGBT social movement: At the crossroads of HIV and LGBT activism

The emergent Dominican LGBT movement in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, has been embedded in local and global structures and discourses related to HIV/AIDS, women's health, and identity. This article explores how ongoing sociocultural changes, increased international HIV funding, and elite support facilitated a surge of collective actions and the institutional reconfiguration of the movement. However, the entry of new cohorts of leaders and the alignment of leaders with global discourses of gender and human rights exposed some rifts within the movement, including over the framing of identity, confrontational tactics, and the role of health issues. While creating political opportunities, international HIV/AIDS funding also consolidated the social movement around HIV at the expense of other issues. The rapid consolidation of the LGBT movement towards HIV issues in the Dominican Republic raises questions about the role of international health funding and health-related NGOs on a movement's discourses, strategies, and consolidation, and about the recruitment of social movement leaders as public health professionals. I suggest that the trajectories of new movements, when social and political opportunities arise, are ultimately defined by their ability to bridge over generational and ideological rifts, engage in a broader spectrum of strategies, and embrace intersectional collective actions.

Social capital, social movements and global public health: Fighting for health-enabling contexts in marginalised settings

Research linking health and social capital is often cited in relation to global public health policies and programmes that mobilise local community participation in health promotion in marginalised settings. A long-standing criticism of this body of analysis and action is its inadequate attention to the power inequalities that drive poor health, often linked to macro-social forces beyond the reach of local community activism. Supplementing social capital research with attention to more ambitious and wide-ranging forms of health activism tackles this criticism. It puts the reproduction and transformation of health-relevant power inequalities at the heart of social capital research and community mobilisation strategies. We use the South African Treatment Action Campaign as a prototype for expanding understandings of social capital for health promotion. Existing social capital work currently focuses on facilitating community mobilisation to create co-operative bonding and bridging social capital (networks of solidarity within and between marginalised communities respectively), as well as linking social capital (networks uniting marginalised communities and more powerful champions). We call for an expanded focus that takes account of how these co-operative networks may serve as springboards for community involvement in adversarial social movements. In such cases, these networks of solidarity serve as launch pads for various forms of demand and protest where the marginalised and their allies confront power-holders in conflictual struggles over health-relevant social resources. We illustrate this expanded framework with two examples of collective action for mental health: the Movement for Global Mental Health and the UK Mental Health User and Survivor Movement. Both seek to use bonding, bridging and linking networks as the basis for movements to pressurise power-holders to increase access to appropriate psychiatric services, adequate welfare support and social respect and recognition for people living with mental distress.

Advocacy Beyond Identity: A Dutch Gay/Lesbian Organization's Embrace of a Public Policy Strategy

The gay/lesbian social movement has primarily been understood as an identity movement. This article contributes to expanding understandings of the gay/lesbian movement by following the advocacy of the Dutch Association for the Integration of Homosexuality COC (COC) as a case of a gay/lesbian movement organization's expansion of its action repertoire to include public policy goals. On the basis of archival and interview data, this article identifies several factors that enabled the COC to see the Dutch government as a potential public policy partner. Previous legal successes and facilitation by the institutionalized wing of the women's movement, coupled with a constitutional change, resulted in the COC's development of a policy strategy. By tracing the history of the COC's strategic interactions, this article demonstrates that, while an identity strategy was constant throughout the COC's advocacy, the organization could combine an identity strategy with strategies of legal change, cultural change, and public policy.

Rites of Resistance: Sex Workers' Fight to Maintain Rights and Pleasure in the Centre of the Response to HIV in Brazil

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted from 2011 to 2015 and the authors' long-term engagement in diverse aspects of HIV and human rights advocacy in Brazil, this paper explores key elements of the Brazilian sex workers' movement response to HIV and the broader political factors that profoundly influenced its trajectory. We argue that the movement has constantly challenged representations of prostitution by affirming sex workers' roles as political actors, not just peer educators, in fighting the HIV epidemic and highlight their development of a sex positive and pleasure centred response that fought stigma on multiple fronts. Moments of tension such as the censorship of an HIV prevention campaign and implementation of 'test and treat' projects are analysed, as are the complex questions that Brazil's 2016 political and economic crisis evokes in terms of how to develop and sustain responses to HIV driven by communities but with material commitment from the State. We conclude with what we see to be the unique, central components of Brazilian sex workers' approach to HIV prevention and what lessons can be learned from it for broader collective health movements in Latin America and beyond.

Sexual identities and participation in liberal and conservative social movements

The desire for social change, political activism, and sexual identities may all be related. Lesbians and gays generally contest heterosexism more than heterosexuals but we do not know how sexual identities sways participation in class, race, and gender based social movements. When analyzing the American National Election Surveys of 2012 (n = 3519), gays and lesbians were about twenty times more likely to join LGB justice campaigns than heterosexuals. Moreover, the greater activism of gays and lesbians also crossed over to recent Occupy Wall Street, peace, and environmental mobilizations. Finally, this analysis ends with logistic regressions that determine if any sexual identity gaps in movement participation are the result of demographic, contextual, and ideological covariates.

Beyond medical humanitarianism - Politics and humanitarianism in the figure of the Mīdānī physician

This article explores the complex position of local physicians at times of political unrest or conflict, conceptualizing local medical voluntarism as a form of collective action. It analyzes the evolving interpretation of medical neutrality among Egyptian physicians who provided medical assistance to injured protesters in the Egyptian uprising (2011-2013). In-depth interviews with 24 medical and non-medical volunteers on their perception of medical neutrality were matched with their mobilization and participation history, showing the extent towards which political considerations influenced their voluntary medical engagement. The results firstly show that revolutionary political considerations played a central role in the physicians' mobilization into medical networks active in the protests, as well as in their interpretation of their medical and non-medical activities. Secondly, I argue that the interpretation of medical neutrality among Egyptian physicians evolved significantly over time. A special type of medical volunteer took shape, the mīdānī physician. This physician openly expresses his/her political convictions and adheres to (self-defined) humanitarian principles through a conscious reconciliation of the two. The article details the increasing difficulty of this task after the revolutionary movement splintered into competing factions and citizens ended up fighting each other instead of authoritarian rule.

Understanding community-based participatory research through a social movement framework: a case study of the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project

BACKGROUND

A longstanding challenge of community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been to anchor evaluation and practice in a relevant theoretical framework of community change, which articulates specific and concrete evaluative benchmarks. Social movement theories provide a broad range of theoretical tools to understand and facilitate social change processes, such as those involved in CBPR. Social movement theories have the potential to provide a coherent representation of how mobilization and collective action is gradually developed and leads to systemic change in the context of CBPR. The current study builds on a social movement perspective to assess the processes and intermediate outcomes of a longstanding health promotion CBPR project with an Indigenous community, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KDSPP).

METHODS

This research uses a case study design layered on a movement-building evaluation framework, which allows progress to be tracked over time. Data collection strategies included document (scientific and organizational) review (n = 51) and talking circles with four important community stakeholder groups (n = 24).

RESULTS

Findings provide an innovative and chronological perspective of the evolution of KSDPP as seen through a social movement lens, and identify intermediate outcomes associated with different dimensions of movement building achieved by the project over time (mobilization, leadership, vision and frames, alliance and partnerships, as well as advocacy and action strategies). It also points to areas of improvement for KSDPP in building its potential for action.

CONCLUSION

While this study's results are directly relevant and applicable to the local context of KSDPP, they also highlight useful lessons and conclusions for the planning and evaluation of other long-standing and sustainable CBPR initiatives. The conceptual framework provides meaningful benchmarks to track evidence of progress in the context of CBPR. Findings from the study offer new ways of thinking about the evaluation of CBPR projects and their progress by drawing on frameworks that guide other forms of collective action.

Can You Hear Me Now? How Communication Technology Affects Protest and Repression

Commentators covering recent social movements, such as the Arab Spring, commonly claim that cell phones enable protests. Yet, existing empirical work does not conclusively support this contention: some studies find that these technologies actually reduce collective action; many others struggle to overcome the selection problems that dog observational research. We propose two mechanisms through which cell phones affect protests: (1) by enabling communication among would-be protesters, cell phones lower coordination costs; and (2) these technologies broadcast information about whether a protest is repressed. Knowing that a larger audience now witnesses and may be angered by repression, governments refrain from squashing demonstrations, further lowering the cost of protesting. We evaluate these mechanisms using high-resolution global data on the expansion of cell phone coverage and incidence of protest from 2007 to 2014. Our difference-in-differences estimates indicate that cell phone coverage increases the probability of protest by over half the mean. Consistent with our second mechanism, we also find that gaining coverage has a larger effect when it connects a locality to a large proportion of other citizens.

Online network organization of Barcelona en Comú, an emergent movement-party

The emerging grassroots party Barcelona en Comú won the 2015 Barcelona City Council election. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement to transform citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement was based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literature postulates that parties develop oligarchical leadership structures. This tension motivates to examine whether Barcelona en Comú preserved a decentralized structure or adopted a conventional centralized organization. In this study we develop a computational methodology to characterize the online network organization of every party in the election campaign on Twitter. Results on the network of retweets reveal that, while traditional parties are organized in a single cluster, for Barcelona en Comú two well-defined groups co-exist: a centralized cluster led by the candidate and party accounts, and a decentralized cluster with the movement activists. Furthermore, results on the network of replies also shows a dual structure: a cluster around the candidate receiving the largest attention from other parties, and another with the movement activists exhibiting a higher predisposition to dialogue with other parties.

Ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability: an overview and conceptual framework

Can ecological distribution conflicts turn into forces for sustainability? This overview paper addresses in a systematic conceptual manner the question of why, through whom, how, and when conflicts over the use of the environment may take an active role in shaping transitions toward sustainability. It presents a conceptual framework that schematically maps out the linkages between (a) patterns of (unsustainable) social metabolism, (b) the emergence of ecological distribution conflicts, (c) the rise of environmental justice movements, and (d) their potential contributions for sustainability transitions. The ways how these four processes can influence each other are multi-faceted and often not a foretold story. Yet, ecological distribution conflicts can have an important role for sustainability, because they relentlessly bring to light conflicting values over the environment as well as unsustainable resource uses affecting people and the planet. Environmental justice movements, born out of such conflicts, become key actors in politicizing such unsustainable resource uses, but moreover, they take sometimes also radical actions to stop them. By drawing on creative forms of mobilizations and diverse repertoires of action to effectively reduce unsustainabilities, they can turn from 'victims' of environmental injustices into 'warriors' for sustainability. But when will improvements in sustainability be lasting? By looking at the overall dynamics between the four processes, we aim to foster a more systematic understanding of the dynamics and roles of ecological distribution conflicts within sustainability processes.

Occupy the government: Analyzing presidential and congressional discursive response to movement repression

I examine the role of Occupy Wall Street in shifting presidential and congressional discourse on economic fairness and inequality. Using data from 4646 presidential speeches and 1256 congressional records from 2009 to 2015, I test different mechanisms, including repression, media coverage, public opinion, and presidential agenda-setting by applying a novel combination of web scraping, natural language processing, and time series models. I suggest that movement success can be measured in its ability to shape discursive opportunity structures, and I argue that the role of the president should be at the forefront of social movements research. Ultimately, I demonstrate (1) that the repression of Occupy protesters not only predicts media coverage but also increases discursive opportunities through President Obama and Congress, (2) that media coverage of Occupy predicts presidential discourse, (3) that the president's rhetorical shift increases congressional response, and (4) that this change persists after the movement faltered.

Ethical Considerations and Dilemmas Before, during and after Fieldwork in Less-Democratic Contexts: some Reflections from Post-Uprising Egypt

How do we conduct ethically sound social research in less- or non-democratic settings? Here, the 'ethical guidelines,' or 'codes of conduct' outlined by our professional organizations provide some, albeit only insufficient guidance. In such contexts, issues like informed consent or the avoidance of harm to research participants have to be - based on a careful analysis of the situation on the ground - operationalized. What are, considering the particular social and political context in the field, the potential risks for interviewees and the researcher, and what can be done to eliminate or at least mitigate these risks? Reflecting on extensive fieldwork on the role of the prodemocracy movement during the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 in the wake of the so-called 'Arab Spring,' this study illustrates how rather abstract ethical considerations can be handled practically in an environment that is characterized by increasing levels of political repression and decreasing civil liberties. It is in such contexts that a failure to carefully consider such ethical questions entails a very real risk of endangering the livelihoods and even lives of research participants. Furthermore, it is shown that these and similar issues are not only of critical importance when designing a research project, but that they might have to be revisited and renegotiated at later stages of the research process - even after the conclusion of the data collection phase. Here, questions of data protection, anonymity of informants, and the associated 'do no harm' principle are particularly pertinent.

School collective occupation movements and substance use among adolescents: A school-level panel design

BACKGROUND

Recently, social movements across the world have demanded reforms to education systems and other institutions. Although such movements have affected large numbers of people across multiple countries, we know little about the impacts they have had on population health. We focus on one example: the massive strikes and collective occupation of secondary schools across Chile, which occurred contemporaneously with a large increase in marijuana use among students in this age group. We aimed to evaluate the causal effects that the 2011 Chilean school strikes had on adolescent substance use, including the initiation of marijuana use and the use of alcohol and marijuana.

METHODS

School-level, aggregated panel design using data from the National Drug Surveys among Secondary Students from 2005 to 2015 for students in grades 9-12. We used a fixed-effects difference-in-difference model to estimate the effect of school occupations on prevalence of self-reported indicators of drug use.

RESULTS

Reported marijuana use doubled between 2009 and 2013 among Chilean adolescents. After controlling for secular trends in outcomes and for school characteristics, there was no evidence of increased marijuana initiation, alcohol and marijuana use, or of an increase in heavy use among adolescents being directly attributable to school strikes and occupations in 2011.

CONCLUSIONS

The 2011 Occupy school movement in Chile had no detectable causal effect on substance use among Chilean adolescents. The increase in marijuana use from 2009 to 2013 seems to be part of broader social changes occurring among the school-age population.

Can we Build on Social Movement Theories to Develop and Improve Community-Based Participatory Research? A Framework Synthesis Review

A long-standing challenge in community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been to anchor practice and evaluation in a relevant and comprehensive theoretical framework of community change. This study describes the development of a multidimensional conceptual framework that builds on social movement theories to identify key components of CBPR processes. Framework synthesis was used as a general literature search and analysis strategy. An initial conceptual framework was developed from the theoretical literature on social movement. A literature search performed to identify illustrative CBPR projects yielded 635 potentially relevant documents, from which eight projects (corresponding to 58 publications) were retained after record and full-text screening. Framework synthesis was used to code and organize data from these projects, ultimately providing a refined framework. The final conceptual framework maps key concepts of CBPR mobilization processes, such as the pivotal role of the partnership; resources and opportunities as necessary components feeding the partnership's development; the importance of framing processes; and a tight alignment between the cause (partnership's goal), the collective action strategy, and the system changes targeted. The revised framework provides a context-specific model to generate a new, innovative understanding of CBPR mobilization processes, drawing on existing theoretical foundations.

Pursuing Social Justice through Public Health: Gender and Sexual Diversity Activism in Malawi

African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) organizations face various strategic dilemmas in contexts characterized by political hostility to gender and sexual dissidents. In Malawi, one such context, we examine how an LGBTIQ social movement organization (SMO) in Malawi, the Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP), navigated one particular strategic dilemma-the dilemma of whether to adopt a less politicized public-health approach or a more nimble, grassroots-oriented, and social-justice approach to their advocacy work-and the consequences of the organization's strategic decisions. Scholars interpret these approaches as signifying differential political engagement among organizations, with the social-justice approach indicating political engagement and the public-health approach signaling political disengagement. This difference has led critics to argue that a public-health approach is poorly suited to generating social and legal reform because it de-politicizes LGBTIQ issues over time, while a social-justice approach exerts constant pressure on political and religious elites. Drawing on qualitative interview data with Malawian LGBTIQ activists and news media data reflecting public debate around homosexuality in the country, we illuminate how this SMO metamorphosed from an organization ostensibly focused only on public health and HIV/AIDS to one that advances social justice for gender and sexual dissidents. We argue for an understanding of the indigenous development of a hybrid strategy integrating the public-health and social-justice approaches.

Socially organized sentiments: Exploring the link between religious density and protest mobilization, 1960-1995

Extensive research has shown individual religiosity to have an impact upon U.S. protest participation. But very little work has examined the role of religious density in a community on the likelihood of protest mobilization. Our research links the religious density across 62 counties in New York State to various protest mobilization issues during the period of 1960-1995. In this research, we develop a theory of socially organized sentiments to examine religious influences on overall protest event mobilizations in local communities, a specific example of a more general theory that can link community structure to multiple forms of civic engagement. The impact of various religious traditions is assessed by using measures for the density of religious population per congregation of three religious traditions-Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism. The analysis also assesses the likelihood of mobilization concerning four specific issues-African-American civil rights, gender, anti-nuclear/peace, and anti-poverty movements.

Rethinking the antivaccine movement concept: A case study of public criticism of the swine flu vaccine's safety in France

In this article I discuss the definition of "the Antivaccine Movement" using the case of the French controversy over the safety of the 2009 pandemic flu vaccine. I show that the group of main actors who criticized the vaccine's safety is heterogeneous. This heterogeneity can be found in the type of arguments mobilized to question the vaccine's safety and in these actors' likelihood of being involved in any vaccine-related controversies. I show that only a minority of these actors rejected vaccination in general and mobilized against all vaccination campaigns. Most of these actors only occasionally mobilized against a given vaccine or vaccination campaign and they did so to promote a political or cultural agenda that went beyond the vaccine itself. Using these results, I argue that in order to better understand how vaccine-related controversies emerge and why some activists devote time and resources to spread vaccine-critical arguments, social scientists should use three distinct concepts to refer to vaccine criticism: The Antivaccine Movement, the Marginally Antivaccine Movements and the Occasionally Vaccine Critical Movements. To do so would enable social scientists and public health experts to better understand the different ways in which vaccination can become politicized and the evolution of this politicization.