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What happened to black youth in the post-civil rights generation? What kind of causes did they rally around and were they even rallying in the first place? This book takes a close look at a variety of key civil rights groups across the country over the last forty years to provide a broad view of black youth and social movement activism. It examines popular mobilization among the generation of activists—principally black students, youth, and young adults—who came of age after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The book argues that the political environment in the post-civil rights era, along with constraints on social activism, made it particularly difficult for young black activists to start and sustain popular mobilization campaigns. Building on case studies from around the country—including New York, the Carolinas, California, Louisiana, and Baltimore—the book explores the inner workings and end results of activist groups such as the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Organization for Black Unity, the Free South Africa Campaign, the New Haven Youth Movement, the Black Student Leadership Network, the Juvenile Justice Reform Movement, and the AFL-CIO's Union Summer campaign. It demonstrates how youth-based movements and intergenerational campaigns have attempted to circumvent modern constraints, providing insight into how the very inner workings of these organizations have and have not been effective in creating change and involving youth.

In January 2009, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States. In the weeks and months following the election, as in those that preceded it, countless social observers from across the ideological spectrum commented upon the cultural, social, and political significance of “the Obama phenomenon.” This book provides a nuanced analysis framed by innovative theoretical insights to explore how Barack Obama's presidential candidacy both reflected and shaped the dynamics of race in the contemporary United States. Using the 2008 election as a case study of U.S. race relations, and based on a wealth of empirical data that includes an analysis of over 1,500 newspaper articles, blog postings, and other forms of public speech collected over a 3-year period, the book claims that while race played a central role in the 2008 election, it was in several respects different from the past. The book ultimately concludes that while the selection of an individual African American man as president does not mean that racism is dead in the contemporary United States, we must also think creatively and expansively about what the election does mean for the nation and for the evolving contours of race in the 21st century.

Historically, Black Americans have easily found common ground on political, social, and economic goals. Yet, there are signs of increasing variety of opinion among Blacks in the United States, due in large part to the influx of Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, and African immigrants to the United States. In fact, the very definition of “African American,” as well as who can self-identity as Black, is becoming more ambiguous. Should we expect African Americans' shared sense of group identity and high sense of group consciousness to endure as ethnic diversity among the population increases? This book addresses the effects of this dynamic demographic change on Black identity and Black politics. It explores the numerous ways in which the expanding and rapidly changing demographics of Black communities in the United States call into question the very foundations of political identity that has united African Americans for generations. African Americans' political attitudes and behaviors have evolved due to their historical experiences with American Politics and American racism. Will Black newcomers recognize the inconsistencies between the American creed and American reality in the same way as those who have been in the United States for several generations? If so, how might this recognition influence Black immigrants' political attitudes and behaviors? Will race be a site of coalition between Black immigrants and African Americans?

From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates' approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens' engagement with the issues—these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion? This book curates a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship.

Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive policymaking context, we now hold the keys to large-scale democratic revitalization. This book shows that the equation may not be so simple. Modern societies face a variety of structural problems that limit potentials for true democratization, as well as vast inequalities in political action and voice that are not easily resolved by participatory solutions. Popular participation may even reinforce elite power in unexpected ways. This book reveals surprising insights into how dilemmas of the new public participation play out in politics and organizations. Through investigations including fights over the authenticity of business-sponsored public participation, the surge of the Tea Party, the role of corporations in electoral campaigns, and participatory budgeting practices in Brazil, the book seeks to refresh our understanding of public participation and trace the reshaping of authority in today's political environment.

Women in the contemporary United States are facing heightened surveillance of their reproductive health and decisions in areas ranging from abortion law to sterilization regulation. While many of these policies seem to undermine women’s decision-making authority, experts and state actors often defend them in terms of promoting women’s autonomy. In Governed through Choice, Jennifer Denbow exposes the way that the notion of autonomy allows for these apparent contradictions and explores how it plays out in recent reproductive law. Denbow also shows how developments in reproductive technology, which would seem to increase women’s options and autonomy, provide opportunities for state management of women’s bodies. Governed through Choice argues that notions of autonomy and choice, as well as transformations in reproductive technology, converge to enable the state’s surveillance of women and undermine their decision-making authority. Governed through Choice also points the way toward a more affirmative and emancipatory vision of reproductive politics. Denbow offers an alternative understanding of autonomy that focuses on critique and social transformation. Moreover, although reproductive technologies create opportunities for heightened state surveillance, they also may help disrupt oppressive norms and enable transformation. In using the frames of autonomy and technology to investigate reproductive law, Governed through Choice provides a critically important analysis that is attuned to the diverse ways in which reproductive bodies are regulated. Through an examination that spans political theory, critical race feminism, neoliberalism, queer studies, and law, Denbow shows how the law regulates women’s bodies as reproductive sites and what can be done about it.

Even as the U.S. political system remains deeply divided between right and left, there is a clear yearning for a more moderate third way that navigates an intermediate position to address the most pressing issues facing the United States today. This book points to a Third Way between liberals and conservatives, combining a commitment to government expenditures that enhance the incomes of working families while recognizing that concerns for program effectiveness, individual responsibility, and underutilization of market incentives are justified. It provides the context to understanding the distinctive qualities of Third Way policies, focusing on seven areas that substantially affect working families: immigration, race and gender earnings disparities, education, housing, strengthening partnerships, and federal taxes. Balancing empirical studies with voices of working class people, the book offers an important perspective on how public policies should be changed. It makes policy recommendations that are both practical and transformative.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a vanguard of young, affluent black leadership has emerged, often clashing with older generations of black leadership for power. The 2002 Newark mayoral race, which featured a contentious battle between the young black challenger Cory Booker and the more established black incumbent Sharpe James, was one of a series of contests in which young, well-educated, moderate black politicians challenged civil rights veterans for power. This book uses Newark as a case study to explain the breakdown of racial unity in black politics, describing how black political entrepreneurs build the political alliances that allow them to be more diversely established with the electorate. The book shows that while both poor and affluent blacks pay lip service to racial cohesion and to continuing the goals of the Civil Rights Movement, the reality is that both groups harbor different visions of how to achieve those goals and what those goals will look like once achieved. This, it argues, leads to class conflict and a very public breakdown in black political unity, providing further evidence of the futility of identifying a single cadre of leadership for black communities. The book provides an on the ground understanding of contemporary Black and mayoral politics.

Gender equality has become a central aspect of global governance and development in the twenty-first century. States increasingly promote women in government, ensure women’s economic rights, and protect women from violence, all in the name of creating a more gender-equitable world. This book, however, challenges the idea that such efforts to include more women can actually promote gender equality. Arguing instead that there is a global “add gender and stir” campaign, in which women and gender have become synonymous, this book interrogates why this campaign has not had a greater global impact. Introducing women’s inclusion as an alternative framing to gender equality, this book delves into the data and research on policies and practices promoting women in public over the last forty years. What emerges is a liberal feminist movement to add women to male-dominated institutions that has done little to challenge binary gender—understood as patterns of masculinities and femininities—and often reinforces it instead. Chapters focus on policies and practices in three areas, including promoting women’s participation in government, increasing women’s economic rights, and protecting women from violence. The book uses “analytical gender” to explain why women’s inclusion is not more emancipatory—exploring how poor implementation, informal practices, gender binaries, and intersectionality remain key issues across all efforts of women’s inclusion. Ultimately all of these efforts have been co-opted by global neoliberal institutions in troubling ways, often reinforcing gender differences rather than challenging them.

In an ideal world, journalists act selflessly and in the public interest regardless of the financial consequences. However, in reality, news outlets no longer provide the most important and consequential stories to audiences; instead, news producers adjust news content in response to ratings, audience demographics, and opinion polls. While such criticisms of the news media are widely shared, few can agree on the causes of poor news quality. This book argues that the incentives in the American free market drive news outlets to report news that meets audience demands, rather than democratic ideals. In short, audiences' opinions drive the content that so often passes off as “the news.” The book looks at news not as a type of media but instead as a commodity bought and sold on the market, comparing unique measures of news content to survey data from a wide variety of sources. The book's analysis shows news firms report certain issues over others, not because audiences need to know them, but because of market demands. It also demonstrates that the influence of market demands also affects the business of news, prohibiting journalists from exercising independent judgment and determining the structure of entire news markets as well as firm branding. Ultimately, the results of the book indicate profit-motives often trump journalistic and democratic values. The findings also suggest that the media actively responds to audiences, thus giving the public control over their own information environment.