Lesley J. Wood

Crisis and control : the militarization of protest policing

1 Introduction 2 Policing Waves of Protest 1995 - 2013 3 To Serve and Protect Who? Policing Trends and Best Practices 4 Local Legitimacy and Struggles for Control 5 Officer Identity and the Diffusion of Pepper Spray 6 Experts, Agencies and Integration 7 Protest As Threat 8 Urine Filled Supersoakers 9 Conclusion 10 List of Acronyms References Index

Reaching Beyond the Net: Political Circuits and Participation in Toronto's G20 Protests

Using a survey of 359 participants in the 2010 protests against the G20 in Toronto, this paper examines the effects and effectiveness of the different communication media in informing diverse participants about the protest. It finds that the communication networks that surrounded the G20 summit protest in Toronto in 2010 were dense and interconnected. Drawing on Tillys ‘political circuits’, the survey shows that activists at the core of these networks used a combination of online and offline modes of communication, while those outside of that core were reliant on fewer channels of information about the protests. These included people of colour, people who are not part of student networks, less educated people and people less involved in existing social movements. Using logistic regression models, we demonstrate that the digital divide may be less important than the structure and means of communication that make up the political circuits of a movement. Based on these models, we argue that communication modes such as social networking sites and the mainstream media may be important tools for bridging the gap between core and peripheral participants.

Eventful events: local outcomes of G20 summit protests in Pittsburgh and Toronto

Abstract How do transnational summit protests affect local activists and the internal dynamics of organizations and movements in a host city? This paper uses Sewell’s concept of ‘eventful temporality’ to explore the impacts of the G20 summit protests in Pittsburgh (2009) and Toronto (2010) Interviews, and field notes are analyzed to show how the mobilizations enhanced the skills of local activists, increased connections between their movements, changed local tactical preferences, stirred emotions, and spawned and shaped new campaigns. The summit protests mobilized new activists, but also exhausted and demobilized some existing protesters. The findings suggest the need for a more nuanced and temporally sensitive framework for understanding outcomes.

Idle No More, Facebook and Diffusion

The indigenous-led movement Idle No More leapt into public view during the winter of 2012–2013, bringing round-dance flash-mobs and blockades to communities across Canada and internationally, becoming a symbol of twenty-first century indigenous resistance. This profile examines the first two months of the movement by analysing the structure of social networks being mobilized, by breaking down the Facebook architecture and interface into its various elements, and by examining how these influence diffusion and its constituent sub-processes. It argues that the combination of dense clusters and weak ties in indigenous social networks leveraged the way Facebook facilitated the movement.

John porter lecture: waves of protest--direct action, deliberation, and diffusion.

The book Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action After the WTO Protests in Seattle argues that the process of diffusion is dependent on social processes in the receiving context. The most important in social movements is an egalitarian and reflexive deliberation among diverse actors. The book traces the direct action tactics associated with the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 and how these spread to activists in Toronto and New York City. It shows how the structure of the political field, racial and class inequalities, identity boundaries, and organizational and conversational dynamics limited deliberation among activists, and thus limited the diffusion of the Seattle tactics. By constraining the spread of the Seattle tactics, this slowed the global justice movements wave of protest. In this paper, I explore the application of and implications of this model of protest tactic diffusion to the recent Idle No More mobilizations.

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid

of adult children’s duty towards aging parents. Women’s ideas become more traditional in this regard as they age, but both period and cohort effects nevertheless indicate declining support for close intergenerational relations. In contrast, attitudes toward traditional gender relations do not show a unilinear pattern of change. While the life-cycle effect is similar to that for intergenerational relations, gender-role attitudes became less traditional between 1993 and 2003 and reversed course after that. As Fukuda states, ‘‘gender-relation attitudes do not show a consistent shift among birth cohorts and survey periods’’ (p. 149). This finding mirrors Japanese media reports of opinion polls showing a slight return to more conservative gender-role attitudes in the past decade. Fukuda also examines the effect of marriage and childbearing on changes in gender-role attitudes and family-related attitudes. These analyses do not always yield clear results, and men’s attitudes in particular seem to vary over time in ways that are not very clear. Here, the often-found clustering of Japanese respondents into a middle ‘‘uncertain’’ or ‘‘neutral’’ category may be one source of difficult-to-interpret results. The clearest and most important finding of Fukuda’s analysis of how family events impact attitudes is that women tend to become more gender-role conservative after the birth of their first child. Several important questions remain unanswered in the book. To be clear, these are questions that Fukuda not only does not answer but also does not raise. I mention them here because of their great importance for understanding change in Japanese marriage and fertility behavior and, by implication, for interpreting Japan’s ‘‘low-fertility’’ trap. First, the book provides few clues as to why the proportion of never-married men and women has increased so dramatically in Japan over the past few decades. Given that so little childbearing in Japan occurs outside of marriage, this is a crucial issue to address in studying Japan’s very low birth rate. Second, the book includes virtually no discussion of the institutional context that inhibits work-family balance, working hours and organizational expectations for men and women in full-time jobs, or the dramatic labor market changes that have pushed more workers into non-standard, insecure jobs in Japan since the early 1990s. In focusing exclusively on articulating economic and value-based theories within a rational action framework and juxtaposing them as competing explanations, Fukuda neglects to consider how the institutional context (labor market structure, work norms, and family policies) as well as dramatic economic change provide the context for individuals’ decisions. As a result, the book does not offer insight into these macro-level features of the Japanese context to readers unfamiliar with them. This is a missed opportunity, one that results from Fukuda’s inclination to stick so closely to micro-level data sets and shy away from broader contextualization. In sum, the main contribution of Fukuda’s book is the detail it offers on how Japanese marriage and fertility behavior varies by individuals’ values and by the demographic correlates we conventionally care about the most: age, education, income, and occupation. Most of all, the book conveys that the path of family change in Japan is complex and that any path toward increasing the fertility rate is not likely to be straightforward.