At a time of deep political divisions, leaders have called on ordinary Americans to talk to one another: to share their stories, listen empathetically, and focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta questions this popular solution for healing our rifts. Talking the way that friends do is not the same as equality, she points out. And initiatives that bring strangers together for friendly dialogue may provide fleeting experiences of intimacy, but do not supply the enduring ties that solidarity requires. But Polletta also studies how Americans cooperate outside such initiatives, in social movements, churches, unions, government, and in their everyday lives. She shows that they often act on behalf of people they see as neighbors, not friends, as allies, not intimates, and people with whom they have an imagined relationship, not a real one. To repair our fractured civic landscape, she argues, we should draw on the rich language of solidarity that Americans already have.

A deeply researched ethnographic portrait of progressive senior activists in Chicago who demonstrate how a tiny public wields collective power to advocate for broad social change. If you've ever been to a protest or been involved in a movement for social change, you have likely experienced a local culture, one with slogans, jargon, and shared commitments. Though one might think of a cohort of youthful organizers when imagining protest culture, this powerful ethnography from esteemed sociologist Gary Alan Fine explores the world of senior citizens on the front lines of progressive protests. While seniors are a notoriously important—and historically conservative—political cohort, the group Fine calls “Chicago Seniors Together” is a decidedly leftist organization, inspired by the model of Saul Alinsky. The group advocates for social issues, such as affordable housing and healthcare, that affect all sectors of society but take on a particular urgency in the lives of seniors. Seniors connect and mobilize around their distinct experiences but do so in service of concerns that extend beyond themselves. Not only do these seniors experience social issues as seniors—but they use their age as a dramatic visual in advocating for political change. In Fair Share, Fine brings readers into the vital world of an overlooked political group, describing how a “tiny public” mobilizes its demands for broad social change. In investigating this process, he shows that senior citizen activists are particularly savvy about using age to their advantage in social movements. After all, what could be more attention-grabbing than a group of passionate older people determinedly shuffling through snowy streets with canes, in wheelchairs, and holding walkers to demand healthcare equity, risking their own health in the process?

Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, George Jacob Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to religion's control over daily life. This first modern biography of the founder of Secularism describes a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Ever on the front lines of social reform, Holyoake was hailed for having won "the freedoms we take for granted today." With Secularism now under siege, George Holyoake's vision of a "virtuous society" rings today with renewed clarity.

"The term "diaspora" is used so commonly that its definition, a community of people living away from their ancestral homeland, seems self-evident. But how do migrants come to form a group, and how do they understand that homeland? In this book, sociologist Sharon Quinsaat sheds new light on the meaning of diaspora through the stories of Filipino migrants who, on first arrival to their new homes in the Netherlands and the US, don't necessarily connect to their Filipino identity or other Filipinos. They maintain ties to the homeland through family, often in the form of remittance payments, but they don't see themselves as part of a Filipino community abroad. After all, how much common ground could there be between a masters student at a private US university and an undocumented domestic worker earning less than minimum wage? Quinsaat shows that these gaps are bridged when Filipinos become engaged in political activism. Quinsaat analyzes three distinct protest movements--against the regime of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, for migrants' rights abroad, and around cultural memory of the Marcos regime--that strengthened Filipino identity among migrants as they gathered collectively to make shared demands in public. These movements bring together very different migrants with a newfound shared goal, requiring them to openly address their different experiences and relationships to their homeland and its history. Social movements thus provide an essential space not just for coming together as diasporic subjects, but for openly negotiating and working through the diversity of migrants' experiences. She also shows that this local engagement with other migrants in a new country of residence quickly ties into a global network of activism. Activist groups forge connections with others living abroad, creating new diasporic identities that crisscross the globe by way of shared political commitments. Spanning five decades, Quinsaat's project helps us understand not just a major migrant group, but how people come to see themselves as part of a collective"--

"In recent years, anonymity has rocked the political and social landscape. The examples are many: an anonymous whistleblower revealed a quid-pro-quo verbal promise made by Donald Trump to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the hacker group Anonymous compromised more than 100 million Sony accounts, and the bestselling author Elena Ferrante insistently refused to reveal her real name and identity. In Anonymous, Thomas DeGloma sets out to provide a sociological theory that accounts for the many faces of anonymity, describing the social forces that give anonymity its unique power in our society. He asks a number of pressing questions about the social conditions and effects of anonymity: What is anonymity, and why, under various circumstances, do individuals act anonymously? How do individuals accomplish anonymity? How do they use it, and, in some situations, how is it imposed on them? What are the implications of anonymous actions, for various relationships, and for society in general, for better or for worse? To answer these questions, DeGloma tackles anonymity thematically, dedicating each chapter to a distinct type of anonymous action. These span what DeGloma calls protective anonymity (when anonymity allows people to take action that would be impossible or unsafe if their identity were known), subversive anonymity (when actors use anonymity to escape scrutiny or punishment, whether for liberatory or nefarious purposes), or ascribed anonymity (when people become effectively anonymous because their individual attributes are subsumed in a generic category such as racial typification). Ultimately, he uncovers how meanings are made and conveyed in anonymous interactions and situations, explores the ways that anonymity can be imposed on individuals in some relationships, and helps us better understand the consequences of anonymous performances and ascriptions of anonymity for all those involved"--

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, people across the former socialist world saw their lives transformed. In just a few years, labor markets were completely disrupted, and the meanings attached to work were drastically altered. How did people who found themselves living under state socialism one day and capitalist democracy the next adjust to the changing social order and its new system of values? Till Hilmar examines memories of the postsocialist transition in East Germany and the Czech Republic to offer new insights into the power of narratives about economic change. Despite the structural nature of economic shifts, people often interpret life outcomes in individual terms. Many are deeply attached to the belief that success and failure must be deserved. Emphasizing individual effort, responsibility, and character, they pass moral judgments based on a person’s fortunes in the job market. Hilmar argues that such frameworks represent ways of making sense of the profound economic and social dislocations after 1989. People craft narratives of deservingness about themselves and others to solve the problem of belonging in a new social order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with engineers and care workers as well as historical and comparative analysis of the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe, Deserved sheds new light on the moral imagination of capitalism and the experience of economic change. This book also offers crucial perspective on present-day politics, showing how notions of deservingness and moral worth have propelled right-wing populism.

This Open Access book explores the role of morality in social movements. Morality has always been central to social movements whether it be in the form of the moral foundations of movement claims, politics and ideologies, the values motivating participation, the new moral principles envisioned and practiced among movement participants, or the overall struggle over society’s moral values that movements engage in. This is evident in movements emerging from recent interlinked crises: the crisis of human rights, the climate crisis, and the developing crisis of democracy. In analyzing these current events through a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical lenses, this book brings morality to the forefront of the discussion, allowing for a rethinking of its role. The book is divided into five parts. The first part introduces and explores the central concept of the book, outlining the dominant existing approaches to morality and ethics in the extant movement and civil society literature. The following three parts investigate morality in relation to topics and movements that are either prominent to contemporary politics or salient to the question of morality. In these empirically informed parts, the authors apply a diverse selection of methods spanning fieldwork, historiography, traditional and novel statistical analytical methods, and big data analysis to a diverse selection of data. Topics discussed include refugee solidarity movements, male privilege and anti-feminism movement, environmental and climate justice movements, and religious activism. The fifth and closing part of the book focuses on the more abstract theoretical question of the relationship between morality and ethics and activist practices and points to future research agendas. This book will be of general interest to students, scholars and academics within the disciplines of political sociology, -science and -anthropology and of particular interest to academics in the subfields of social movement and civil society studies.