APPALLING ACTS OF BRUTALITY WITH SEXUAL SLAVE GIRLS: SUBALTERN COGNIZANCE AND SOCIAL CRUSADING IN SOMALY MAM'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL RECOUNT

Purpose of the study: This research explores Somaly Mam's The Road of Lost Innocence through the perspective of gender subaltern in which she calls for collective activism to empower sexual slave girls' position and status in society. She raises her voice against the dominant social force to establish her own space and other sexed women's space in society Methodology: This research is qualitative in nature. To analyze the selected text, few critics and writers have observed the text from different perspectives. Theories of Spivak, Guha, Suzette R Grillot, Heidi Hoefinger, Nicholas Kristof, Abigali Pesta, and Karen Thornber support this research to find the answers to the research questions. Main Findings: Mam depicts unspeakable acts of brutality with sexual slave girls in brothels. Through writing, she appeals to all people in the world to take the issue of sexuality and girl trafficking seriously which is horrible these days. Applications of this study: This paper will emphasize Mam's subaltern consciousness which is ambivalent consciousness. Mam requests for collective activism to eradicate women's exploitation from the world. Her activism looks contributory but paradoxical. Novelty/Originality of this study: The study is novel in its approach and methods of research in autobiographical literature. Despite being an orphan, domestic and sexual slave girl, Mam succeeds to be an activist and reformist through her struggle. Her activism plays important role in the field of sexual slavery and girl trafficking.

The politics of welfare

Steven Klein’s excellent new book The Work of Politics is an innovative, insightful and original argument about the valuable role that welfare institutions may play in democratic movements for change. In place of a one-sided Weberian view of welfare institutions as bureaucratic instruments of social control, Klein recasts them in Arendtian terms as ‘worldly mediators’ or participatory mechanisms that act as channels for a radical politics of democratic world making. Although Klein is careful to modulate this utopian vision through a developed account of power and domination, I question the relevance of this largely historical model of world-building activism for the contemporary world of welfare. I point to the way that decades of neoliberal social policy have arguably eroded many of the social conditions and relations of solidarity that are vital prerequisites for collective activism around welfare.

Mapping Working-Class Activism in Reconstruction St. Louis

Blending the tools of micro-history with historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) permits us to chart the social networks and everyday journeys of black working-class women activists and the middle-class men with whom they came into contact in Reconstruction St. Louis. Social and spatial ties shaped the activism of St. Louis’ working-class women; mapping these ties reveals the links between everyday acts of resistance and organized efforts of African Americans to carve out a space for themselves in the restructuring city and make visible a collective activism that crossed class and racial boundaries.

Climate activism: what we know and what more we need to learn. A psychological and sociological review

Earth is experiencing severe global heating due to anthropogenic activities, and while measures to reduce CO2 emissions need to be quickly set in place, most governments are not doing so. Grassroot collective action plays a fundamental role in putting pressure on governments to increase emission regulations, yet few people engage in such collective action. It is important to better understand what triggers one’s decision to join collective action and why. In this review, I summarize some of the factors that have been found to correlate with engagement in environmental collective activism, drawing on the empirical psychological and sociological literature. I then propose that additional factors have been pointed out by theoretical sociology, that are relevant candidates for future empirical testing. I conclude by pointing out limitations of the current literature on climate activism, and I make suggestions for methodological improvements.

Pandemic temporalities: Distal futurity in the digital Capitalocene

This article situates the cultural significance of COVID-19 at the intersection of critical conversation around capitalism, the digital and the environmental ‐ fields where time and temporality are key elements to understanding what it means to imagine futures in an unequal, uncertain and alienated world. It argues that the exponential proliferation of digital lifeworlds during COVID-19 is symptomatic of deeper disjunctive temporalities symptomatic of late-stage capitalism. This article further considers if ‘pandemic temporality’, experienced through rapidly expanding virtual worlds (or digital Capitalocenes), takes us further away from becoming contemporaneous with inhabited ecological time. It also examines how the very asynchronicities of digital lifeworlds may show us possible alternatives to capitalist temporalities through contemporaneous and collective activism.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND PROTESTS ENGAGEMENT: WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Social media allows people to organize themselves and take action against social injustices and policies. Used to spread information, social media has been linked to the dissemination of political protests around the world. Relying on the Theory of Planned Behavior and Herd Behavior, this studied aimed at identifying gender differences in social network protests’ participation. Making use of multivariate data analysis through Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-SEM), 318 Brazilians responded the study and the results indicate that there are differences between the relationships of the antecedents of the use of the social network between users of different genders. The differences are in the relationship between the attitude and the use of social networks to participate in protests, with a positive effect on men and negative on women. This means that men understand that participating in online protests through social networks can improve awareness of events, giving strength to the movement and helping to ease the tension of protests, while women do not. The results go beyond the studies on which they were based, including the gender multigroup analysis and presenting a new model of technology adoption with new elements, such as the herd behaviour, embracing the imitation, and the uncertainty constructs. There is also a contribution to a greater understanding of the influence of social media on collective activism or movements.

Writing Lebanese Feminist History

In this chapter, Nicole Khoury analyzes the editorials in one of Lebanon’s most successful feminist journals, Al-Raida. Through examining the first decade of Rose Ghurayyib’s editorials, she recovers a part of Lebanese feminist history that has been largely ignored. The editorials illustrate that arguments for gender equality in the midseventies were grounded in liberal feminist theory. Written during the violent civil war, and the period of foreign influences, the editorials mark a shift in the focus of the Lebanese feminist movement to postcolonial feminist theory, a shift that changed the way the movement articulated its goals. While the editorials first addressed an English-speaking elite Lebanese audience, they later began to focus on a collective activism that defined women’s needs and goals within the larger national and international context, marking an important shift in Lebanese feminist history.

Territorial Ironies: Deservingness as a Struggle for Migrant Legitimacy in Belgium

This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state responds to undocumented migrants by enforcing and implementing citizenship policies that persistently keep them on the fringes of legitimacy and recognition. The discursive constructions of ‘good citizens’ that undocumented migrants embody and make claims to in Belgium extend to and envelop the lives of undocumented migrants in Europe in general.