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Understanding Post-Occupy Police Surveillance of Activists

Description
While police surveillance of political protestors is not a new phenomenon, the use of social media platforms as surveillance tools by various law enforcement agencies is rising in popularity and functions to identify and track activists merely engaging in their protected right to protest. Although troublesome, these tactics can be…

While police surveillance of political protestors is not a new phenomenon, the use of social media platforms as surveillance tools by various law enforcement agencies is rising in popularity and functions to identify and track activists merely engaging in their protected right to protest. Although troublesome, these tactics can be subverted by individuals who wish to protect their privacy while still exercising their right to organize politically.
ContributorsBaker, Laine Marie (Author) / Ingram-Waters, Mary (Thesis director) / Hecht, Justine (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2015-05

Stand in the Place Where You Are: The Impact of Colin Kaepernick’s Political Protest

Description

Former NFL player Colin Kaepernick began protesting during the national anthem in 2016. This research addresses the impacts that Kaepernick and his protests had on himself, the NFL, and the issues he was protesting. The research finds that Kaepernick was blackballed out of the NFL and that hundreds of other…

Former NFL player Colin Kaepernick began protesting during the national anthem in 2016. This research addresses the impacts that Kaepernick and his protests had on himself, the NFL, and the issues he was protesting. The research finds that Kaepernick was blackballed out of the NFL and that hundreds of other NFL players joined him in protest, which caused the league to ban the action before eventually becoming more political as a league. Additionally, the protests brought greater awareness to the issues and prompted some to become more politically active. In addition to providing a new framework for researching examples of politics in sports, this project concludes that athlete-activists can sacrifice themselves to provide more freedom for future athletes to be activists.
ContributorsMichel, Jeffrey (Author) / Voorhees, Matthew (Thesis director) / Suk, Mina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor)
Created2023-05
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Exploring Protest Poetry

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Throughout every liberation movement in America’s history, poetry has been an undeniably powerful act of resistance. Even today, protest poetry is instrumental to countless resistance movements because it captures attention, evokes emotion, and demands social progress. My project is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of…

Throughout every liberation movement in America’s history, poetry has been an undeniably powerful act of resistance. Even today, protest poetry is instrumental to countless resistance movements because it captures attention, evokes emotion, and demands social progress. My project is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of five journals. These journals are informal written responses that conversate with different texts and analyze specific images within specific passages. My exploration of protest poetry focuses on five prominent poets of the last century: Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Gloria Anzaldúa, Camille T. Dungy, and Claudia Rankine. The second part of this project is my contribution to protest poetry. For my collection, I crafted ten poems in which I resist a range of issues that have to do with class, gender, and ethnicity. My protest poetry is also an examination of what it means to be human, particularly in modern day America.
ContributorsGomez, Nikole (Author) / Kirsch, Sharon (Thesis director) / Amparano Garcia, Julie (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
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Narrative, Organization, and Political Efficacy: A Comparative Study of the Occupy and Tea Party Movements

Description
Following the 2008 financial crisis, two social movements emerged in the United States, both attempting to address economic anxieties and grievances, though from very different ideological positions. The Tea Party Movement and the Occupy Movement arose within a few years of one another, and both sought to explain the…

Following the 2008 financial crisis, two social movements emerged in the United States, both attempting to address economic anxieties and grievances, though from very different ideological positions. The Tea Party Movement and the Occupy Movement arose within a few years of one another, and both sought to explain the failure of the existing economic system, whether in terms of overregulation and government overreach, or in terms of political corruption and the failures of capitalism. Despite both movements seeking to address economic failures and anxieties, and both movements emerging within two years of one another, the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Movement had very different trajectories and outcomes. Putting aside the question of how to measure the success of a social movement, it is clear that the lasting effects of these two movements were quite different despite substantial similarities in the timing of these movements, and the economic anxieties which helped fuel them. While there are likely a constellation of factors which contributed to the differing outcomes between these two movements, the factors of interest in this analysis are the narratives espoused by these movements, and the relationship between narrative, and the organization and political activities of these movements.
ContributorsHallikainen, Hannah (Author) / Kubiak, Jeffrey (Thesis director) / Hechter, Michael (Committee member) / Chemical Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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Explaining the Chilean Protests of 2019-2020: The Pinochet Dictatorship and its Neoliberal Legacy

Description
In the past year, Chile has experienced the largest civil uprising since the Pinochet dictatorship ending in 1990. This study was conducted in order to better understand the deep-seated motivations behind the mass protests. Due to the relatively recent nature of these demonstrations, little research has yet to be published.…

In the past year, Chile has experienced the largest civil uprising since the Pinochet dictatorship ending in 1990. This study was conducted in order to better understand the deep-seated motivations behind the mass protests. Due to the relatively recent nature of these demonstrations, little research has yet to be published. Scholarly literature indicates that Pinochet’s neoliberal policies—especially within the education, housing, and social security sectors—have prevented real progressive change and are structured to mainly benefit the business elites. Even 30 years after Pinochet’s authoritarian regime, left-leaning administrations attempted to improve the economic and social situations of the lower classes but could not due to the structural inequalities at the base of the Chilean economy and society. Foundationally, Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy has yet to be completely dismantled which is also echoed throughout the interview data.

Interviews were analyzed using content analysis in order to complement the literature and provide for new explanations. These interviews were collected through online news and firsthand reports of actual protesters and academics reflecting on the protests. Interviews from Chileans provide a window into the perspective of protesters in their own words. After coding the transcriptions of the first-hand reports, the primary findings of these sources show anger about human rights violations during the protests, frustration with the neoliberal economic structure, and current disconnection between the government and the people. This study found that Pinochet’s economic legacies implemented through his authoritarian dictatorship can help explain the 2019 civil uprising.
ContributorsConnor, Riley J. (Author) / Haglun, LaDawn (Thesis director) / Bar, Eyal (Committee member) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
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Raging Against the Meme: Hegemony, Protest Music, and Memes as Ideological Capital

Description
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how the music and rhetoric of Rage Against the Machine is co-opted and delegitimized through internet memes. After a thorough internet search, I chose five memes that express opposing viewpoints to that of RATM’s anti-capitalist, liberalistic messaging and examined their appropriation of…

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how the music and rhetoric of Rage Against the Machine is co-opted and delegitimized through internet memes. After a thorough internet search, I chose five memes that express opposing viewpoints to that of RATM’s anti-capitalist, liberalistic messaging and examined their appropriation of lyrics from their popular hit “Killing In the Name.” as well as the accusations of hypocrisy levied against the band for being inauthentic protest musicians. I also draw comparisons between the structure of these five memes and other politically centric internet memes such as Pepe the Frog and his appropriation by the alt-right, and the attacks against the hashtag Black Lives Matter through the antagonistic hashtag All Lives Matter. I observed the way internet memes use cultural icons to distort and shape narratives about the images’ meanings, in certain cases dissolving an icon’s original message or context entirely. I also propose the idea of internet memes as “ideological capital” that internet users exchange to bolster hegemonic thought and a national identity.
ContributorsBrown, Joshua H. (Author) / Walker, Michael (Thesis director) / Gruber, Diane (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2022-05