Relay activism and the flows of contentious publicness on WeChat: a case study of COVID-19 in China

This paper explores a case of public contention against the censoring of a feature article about a COVID-19 whistleblower on the Chinese social media, WeChat. Moving beyond the normative theory of the public sphere and publics, we draw on Kavada and Poell's theory of 'contentious publicness' which is flexible enough to capture the complexity, diversity and hybridity of digital contention in the context of China. Through a combination of textual analysis and participatory observation, this article analyses how citizens challenged the censorship system and attempted to keep Dr Fen's story online through what we call 'relay activism'. Informed by the three dimensions of 'contentious publicness', we analyse the materiality of the communication infrastructure of WeChat and the temporal and spatial relations of the public contention (focusing primarily on WeChat and GitHub). In doing this, the paper contributes a more comprehensive approach to examining the social, structural and participatory characteristics of the contestation of censorship in China.

TEST ON JUDICIAL ACTIVISM IN SOCIETY IN A CRISIS AGGRAVATED BY PANDEMIA: NECESSARY REFLECTIONS ON RECOMMENDATION 62/2020, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JUSTICE (CNJ)

After experiences of significant violations of the essential rights to the person as a human being that marked, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, taking as a landmark the post-World War II, there is an expansion of rights and instruments for their effectiveness, both internally, or international. In this context, a different state stance was demanded: of power centered on an authoritarian monarch followed by the non-interventionist to the State of Social Welfare where the promotion, expansion and instrumentation of rights became essential. In Brazil, with the democratization of the country and the promulgation of a Constitution, the essential foundation of which is the dignity of the human person, the realization of fundamental rights and the respect for separation come to permeate the entire legal system. In that same step, before the legislative option of providing for indeterminate legal concepts plus the "doctrine of the enforcement of fundamental rights”, it allowed the judicial protagonism to expand in the country, more commonly called "judicial activism” which, a priori, has a negative and needs to be contained. With the social and economic crisis aggravated by the covid-19 pandemic, this activist role of the Judiciary is also present, so reflections need to be made. Thus, the present study will be dedicated to the analysis of judicial activism in the context of a pandemic crisis, pointing out positive and negative aspects, based on a qualified doctrinal review and Recommendation 62/2020, by CNJ. © 2022, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. All rights reserved.

We Need More Praxis: A Case for Praxis Assignments in Psychology Courses

Introduction: This paper explores what praxis is and its importance for catalyzing social justice. Statement of the Problem: At times, psychologists have articulated the importance of bridging the researcher-activist divide via praxis, but progress in creating these bridges has been slow. Literature Review: We examine how praxis can be rooted in decolonial pedagogical approaches and a tool that can bridge scholarship and activism. Building on previous work by teachers of psychology, we review small, medium, and large-scale praxis assignments that have been used in university courses. Teaching Implications: We discuss our own versions of praxis assignments used in four different psychology courses (three of which took place during the pandemic). We reflect on the ways we see students motivated by an assignment with relevance to the real world and potential for creating social change, the ways that students are able to integrate course material more deeply through action, and some of the challenges with these assignments. Conclusion: We conclude by providing recommendations for educators interested in assigning praxis projects in their psychology courses.

Limitation of rights in the times of the COVID-19 pandemic: a view from Kosovo's Constitutional Court's 'shaky' jurisprudence

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments across the globe to take infection-control actions by and large unforeseen and unforeseeable in their constitutional frameworks. Several measures forcing restrictions on travel, business operations, labour, healthcare and/or the education system have characterised public policy in most of them. A fair number of those restrictions adopted in the form of government or legislature decisions are labelled as 'lockdown measures'. This article examines two recent cases ruled upon by the Constitutional Court of Kosovo (CCK or Court), whose primary aim was to pronounce on whether the Kosovo government's lockdown measures were compatible with the criteria authorising a limitation of fundamental rights. These two cases present an outstandingly activist attitude of the Court in controlling government behaviour in times of a pandemic outbreak, by primarily questioning the state's negative obligations in the face of freedom of movement, right to private and family life, and freedom of assembly;whereas positive obligations of the state with regard to the right to life and its associated right, the right to health, were neglected altogether. The article concludes that the mechanical interpretation which the two Court cases drew neither contributes to a richer substantive human rights protection, nor functionally elevates the concept of human rights in times of pandemic. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Human Rights is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Saving the Other, Saving the Self: Exploring Children's and Young People's Feelings About the Coronavirus, Climate, and Biodiversity Crises

Children and young people often have great clarity about the need for urgent external activism to express their anxiety about the climate and biodiversity crises. They also may also have a focus for external activism by virtue of a more empathetic relationship with the natural world than adults. They seem to see more clearly that interdependency with the natural world needs to be at the centre of the struggle to "save the planet”, and they link the need to save "the other” in the world around them in order to save humanity and themselves. The coronavirus is perceived differently by many young people, who feel despair that it has pushed the climate emergency from people's minds. We need new stories and narratives to help adults and children to imagine a new future in the face of their differing anxieties about the coronavirus, climate, and biodiversity crises. By exploring the emotional landscape of children and young people, and then integrating "internal activism” with "external activism”, we can imagine and then build new shared futures. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Feminist Governance in the European Parliament: The Political Struggle over the Inclusion of Gender in the EU's COVID-19 Response

The research objective of this article is to analyze the European Parliament's response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of feminist governance. Feminist governance can either play a role in ensuring the inclusion of a gender perspective in crisis responses, or, quite the opposite, crises may weaken or sideline feminist governance. The empirical analysis focuses on two aspects of feminist governance: (1) a dedicated gender equality body and (2) gender mainstreaming. In addition to assessing the effectiveness of feminist governance, the analysis sheds light on the political struggles behind the policy positions. The article argues that feminist governance in the European Parliament was successful in inserting a gender perspective into the COVID-19 response. The article pinpoints the effects of the achievements of the European Parliament's Women's Rights and Gender Equality Committee and gender mainstreaming on gendering the pandemic crisis response.

#ButNotMaternity: Analysing Instagram posts of reproductive politics under pandemic crisis

In this article, we perform a thematic analysis of a sample of 70 #ButNotMaternity Instagram posts. #ButNotMaternity is a hashtag that emerged in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic whereby the public, healthcare workers and campaigners shared experiences and concerns about pandemic maternity care restrictions and their disproportionate disadvantages for pregnant women. In the article, we analyse four themes that emerged from our thematic analysis – Individual experiences, loneliness and overcoming adversity, Voicing anger and absurdity, Mobilising anger and calls to action and Coordinated activism. Thinking about #ButNotMaternity in the context of ‘freelance feminism', our article has a twofold aim. First, we explore the concept of ‘freelance feminism' through #ButNotMaternity, asking to what extent this campaign draws from freelance tactics. Second, we use the hashtag to illuminate maternity inequality and modes of resistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through our thematic analysis, we argue that while ‘freelance feminism' might be becoming hegemonic as a dominant mode of organising feminist activism and resistance, inspired by Malik et al. (2020), we also showcase how creative campaigns are potential places where collective action, structural critique and resistance may emerge. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Journal of Cultural Studies is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

‘The slow pandemic': youth's climate activism and the stakes for youth movements under Covid-19

Pandemic conditions have affected social movement activity in various ways. In this article, we explore how young Cypriot climate activists, associated with the global Fridays for Future movement, attempt to integrate pandemic conditions in their mobilizing tactics, as well as how such conditions affect their collective youth agency. We first look into the strategic antagonistic framings they develop to counter dominant discourses of the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis and explore how these are informed by their understandings of, and emotions on, climate change as an effect of capitalism and overconsumption and as a type of ‘slow pandemic'. We argue that by extending climate change crisis discourse to encompass the cause of the pandemic, young activists assert temporality as continuity, rather than rupture, and challenge the distinction between the exceptional and the everyday on which Emergency governance is based on. By doing this, they unsettle adult hegemonic discourses on temporality, emergency and crisis that lead to an uneven world. Secondly, we reflect on the impact of Covid-19 on non-institutional youth activism by exploring the challenges these activists face to their sustenance and reproduction, given that access to public space, as we claim, is crucial for teenagers in developing the necessary relationality that is key for the maintenance of their social movement activity. We argue that youth movements emerge and operate within particular conditions which are currently under threat given the distinct mechanisms of governing populations engineered during Covid-19.

Direito à moradia: as ações do Museu das Remoções durante a pandemia

A luta pelo direito à moradia no Brasil continuou existindo durante a pandemia de Covid-19 e precisou adotar novas estratégias diante das restrições sanitárias. Este artigo aborda as reivindicações do movimento do Museu das Remoções e sua atuação em defesa do direito à moradia. A pesquisa baseia-se em dados qualitativos da transcrição de debates realizados em 2020 e 2021 pelo Museu das Remoções com outros movimentos sociais na Internet. Os resultados revelam que os principais desafios enfrentados por movimentos sociais durante a pandemia foram a insuficiência do Estado brasileiro em assegurar o direito à moradia com dignidade nas cidades e a contínua violência nos despejos e nas remoções ocorridos mesmo diante das restrições sanitárias. A pesquisa mostra que a disputa por territórios nos centros urbanos atende fundamentalmente aos interesses do capitalismo imobiliário, capaz de inviabilizar inclusive o cumprimento de medidas sanitárias em saúde pública em meio a uma pandemia com elevada letalidade.Alternate :The struggle for the right to housing in Brazil continued to exist during the Covid-19 pandemic and had to adopt new strategies in the face of health restrictions. This article addresses the demands of the Museum of Removals movement and its performance in defense of the right to housing. The research is based on qualitative data from the transcript of debates held in 2020 and 2021 by the Removals Museum with other social movements on the internet. The results reveal that the main challenges faced by social movements during the pandemic were the failure of the Brazilian State to ensure the right to housing with dignity in cities and the continuous violence in evictions and removals that occurred even in the face of health restrictions. The research shows that the dispute over territories in urban centers fundamentally serves the interests of real estate capitalism, capable of even making it impossible to comply with sanitary measures in public health in the midst of a pandemic with high lethality.

Migrant Worker Dormitories: Virus in a Neoliberal Politics of Space

In neoliberal Singapore, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of low-waged migrant workers who are attracted to Singapore to earn a living building and cleaning the city and serving its residents. Their presence in this already crowded city provokes a dualistic public response that originates from a grudging acceptance of their indispensability: on the one hand, a refusal to allow them to fully integrate with Singapore society and be treated as equal human beings;and, on the other hand, a compassionate desire to help them when they are in need. The former tendency has had the effect of making migrant workers as invisible as possible, hence the profitable solution to house large numbers of them in dormitories located in the peripheral spaces of the island. Capitalism, profit maximization, and space optimization have created conditions and practices of exploitation that are, in normal times, cloaked in invisibility. The 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 in these dormitory spaces should not be surprising, unless they had been so well-hidden in the blind spots of public conscience and policy consciousness. The outbreaks also produced dualistic public reactions: moral panic and the stigmatization of infectious foreigners as dirty and dangerous folk devils, which demands further spatial segregation;and civic activism that steps up to the service of helping the vulnerable in their time of need. The solutions going forward will likely be technical rather than normative in nature, well within the segregating and exploitative logic of neoliberal globalization, with evermore-ingenious ways to extract value from migrant-worker labour, while making them and the heterotopia in which they exist as invisible and distant as possible. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Corrigendum: Displacement of the Scholar? Participatory Action Research Under COVID-19 (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, (2022), 6, (762065), 10.3389/fsufs.2022.762065)

In the published article, there was an error in the Funding statement. The funding statement was missing. The correct Funding statement appears below. Copyright © 2023 Auerbach, Muñoz, Affiah, Barrera de la Torre, Börner, Cho, Cofield, DiEnno, Graddy-Lovelace, Klassen, Limeberry, Morse, Natarajan and Walsh.

Mixed-status informal couples in a cascading crisis. Immobilisation, mobilisation, and normalisation?

In France, the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced as a cascading crisis, with its effects rippling out beyond its initial health domain. Due to the lockdown and ban on travel, the closure of borders, and the slowdown of administrative services, the pandemic had an unanticipated effect on transnational French/foreign couples lacking formal legal relationship status, causing separation and uncertainty. Overlapping health and migration concerns generated a new specific border regime, which reinforced the already existing 'deservingness' criteria for seeking to move to and integrate into the nation. The imposed geographical and administrative immobilisation led to some couples creating online self-help communities, which offered emotional support and shared coping strategies for couples caught in the deadlock. These communities have given the challenges faced by mixed-status couples fresh visibility. Drawing on an ethnography conducted in four online communities, in-depth interviews with transnational couples, and an analysis of politico-juridical materials and grey literature, this article focuses on marriage becoming the option for French/foreign couples seeking the right to reunite in France during an uncertain period. More precisely, by using crisis studies to frame the impact of the pandemic and articulating the scholarship on socio-legal and intimate citizenship, the experiences of such couples can be understood as specific processes in legal consciousness, producing acts of intimate citizenship. This perspective helps demonstrate how the pandemic emphasised the policing of migrant couples, and how institutional and legal opportunities narrowed the choices available to such couples, reducing the potential of change that is generally inherent in crises.

Commemorative Populism in the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Strategic (Ab)use of Memory in Anti-Corona Protest Communication on Telegram

During the COVID-19 pandemic, self-proclaimed resistance movements have organized protests against containment measures both in digital media and on the streets. References to the past and an invocation of collective memory have been important elements in the toolbox of their populist communication. We propose the notion of "commemorative populism" to describe the weaponization of history and memory for the proliferation of a political cause by populist activists. In a qualitative content analysis, we examined postings by the German "Querdenker," a movement against Corona containment policies. Findings show 6 types of the (ab)use of history and collective memory: (1) the recontextualization of quotations by historical personalities, (2) the creation of false historical analogies and flattering genealogies, (3) the claim of historical exceptionalism, (4) the denigration of elites by referring to failures of medical history, (5) the dissemination of disinformation about historical facts, and (6) the support of conspiracy myths by the myths' own history.

Life in the National Basketball Association Bubble: A Space for Social Justice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

On March 11, 2020, the National Basketball Association (NBA) became the first major professional sporting organization in the United States to suspend its season due to COVID-19 concerns. Three months later, the NBA's Board of Governors announced their plan to return-to-play. Twenty-two of the thirty NBA franchises were invited to the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida to finish the regular season and begin the playoffs. The NBA's plan for keeping everyone safe from the virus was to establish a quarantine zone, colloquially referred to as the NBA Bubble. Within this ‘bubble' environment all of the players, coaches, staff, media, and others, were quartered at three specifically-chosen hotels located within the Disney complex, and the remaining basketball games were played in spectator-less venues on-site at the ESPN Wide World of Sports. This chapter discusses the creation of the Bubble and explores various aspects of the players' lives within this unique space. It also examines how the Bubble encouraged activism and social justice endeavors in association with the Black Lives Matter movement following the police-related deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Are you "following" me?: Gen Z's emotional intelligence in online activism

The author rather than accepting the prevailing narrative that adolescents are becoming socially impaired by technology, explores the ways in which digital natives have utilized and at times advanced beyond their forebears in terms of social intelligence, exploring the convergence of social, racial, gender, and political identity on the internet during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, she considers the experience of the psychotherapist wrestling with personal loss and attunement and repair within the therapeutic relationship. The Social Dilemma, a Netflix film released in 2020, daunts a chilling narrative of the online social sphere. The Social Dilemma depicts how essentially we are puppets of digital creators and being exploited for capital gains. Technology is smart, sometimes too smart. And if we are not learning how to be responsible, mindful, productive consumers of social media and emphasizing the need to cultivate emotional intelligence traits both offline and online through social-emotional learning and digital literacy, we will most certainly find ourselves riddled with technological addictions and other significant mental health impairments inclusive of rising suicide rates among more avid online users. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Social work under COVID-19: A thematic analysis of articles in 'SW2020 under COVID-19 magazine'

This article presents a thematic analysis of 100 articles which appeared in 'SW2020 under COVID-19' online magazine, authored by people with lived experience, practitioners, students and academics. The magazine was founded by an editorial collective of the authors of this article and ran as a free online magazine during the period of the first UK COVID-19 lockdown period (March-July 2020). It contained a far higher proportion of submissions from the first three groups of contributors, above, than traditional journals. The analysis is organised under four analytic themes: 'Hidden populations;Life, loss and hope;Practising differently and Policy and system change'. The article concludes by describing the apparent divergence between accounts that primarily suggest evidence of improved working relationships between social workers and those they serve via digital practices, and accounts suggesting that an increasingly authoritarian social work practice has emerged under COVID-19. We argue that, notwithstanding this divergence, an upsurge in activism within social work internationally during the pandemic provides a basis for believing that the emergence of a community-situated, socially engaged social work is possible post-pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The Criminal Justice Activism of Naomi Osaka: A Case Study in the Criminology of Celebrity Culture.

This paper examines the criminal justice activism of tennis star Naomi Osaka as it evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic regarding matters of police violence and racial justice. Calls to reform and defund the police received much attention in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. The Floyd killing also motivated Naomi Osaka to begin her criminal justice activism, which has generally been very well received. Adopting a constructionist perspective, I investigate how Osaka's criminal justice activism has, in the broader context of the development of celebrity culture, been subjectively motivated and inter-subjectively received by the public and in the news media. Theoretically this paper has the two-fold objective of developing a model of the conditions favorable to the successful reception of celebrity activism and, additionally, of suggesting how such criminologically relevant activism can be understood in terms of a process of celebritization of criminal justice and police reform as causes worthy of attention. This case study of Osaka's criminal justice activism reveals the important role a celebrity can play in influencing public sentiments about key aspects of policing and crime control as an important element of criminal justice culture.

The Why and Whither of Asian American Studies: Toward a Reckoning

Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014) On March 11, 2020, roughly three months after the first death attributed to the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus was confirmed in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization elevated its characterization of the ensuing outbreaks from "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC) to global pandemic. [...]we editors, along with the contributors to this special issue, acknowledge from the outset that the formation of Asian American studies—along with ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies—was first and foremost a paradigmatic endeavor, one that, as Lisa Lowe productively characterizes it, remains "key to thinking in comparative relational ways about race, power, and interconnected colonialisms. More than a few students found themselves spending more time in the community than in school. [...]were born a host of Asian American community organizations and services, as well as an increasing vector of Asian American political activism in defense of our communities. "4 Such reckonings, intimately tied to the formation of Asian American studies as a critical race-based interdiscipline born out of 1960s civil rights movements and liberation fronts, encapsulate the field's aspirational politics.

Imagining Feminist Academic Collaborations Beyond Exceptionalized Crises

In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, universities and colleges across the United States began to unroll plans to shift residential teaching to remote or virtual learning environments. As feminist scholars primarily located in the US academy, we are invested in mapping longer genealogies of crises in the settler-colonial US academy, delineating how racist, imperial, and hierarchical structures that are replicated and reinstated by the academy formulate continuous and ongoing discursive and material violence towards racialized, classed, and gendered minorities. By centering what we refer to as feminist modalities of care tthat center collective, communal, and transnational feminist interventions, this article challenges the imperatives of academic success and survival beyond the logics of emergency and crisis. We explore the interlinked transnational discourses of emergency and crisis, mapping their travels and circulations in local and global academic networks in ways that reproduce systemic inequalities and the politics of value that inform power hierarchies within the academy. Energized by a refusal to normalize crises, this essay is invested in showing how feminist interventions, here explored under three modalities, including research and teaching collaborations and coalitions that take place inside and beyond the academy and against its competitive logics, can challenge the imperatives of academic survival premised on notions of individualistic care, productivity, and worth.