Hysterical lesbians and respectable gays. Lesbian anonymity in mainstream LGBT+ and grassroots activisms.

This article is informed by sixteen in-depth interviews with LGBT + activists in Romania, my archive and notes during my involvement in feminist and queer activist circles, as well as archival materials of an LGBT + NGO. It proposes the concept of lesbian anonymity as a means of investigating the way in which marginal positions within mainstream movements are anonymized and their contributions to the movement dispersed within the generic queer/gay activism. By looking at specific case studies from Romaniás transition period (1989 to mid 2000s), I analyze how matters of representation were tackled within the LGBT + mainstream movements in relation to grassroots activist circles. The article explores what happens when queer gatekeepers fail to engage with internal criticisms concerning the selective erasure of certain categories of voices such as queer women, trans people, racialized people, sex workers. I argue that lesbian anonymity offers another angle of analyzing the clashes between and within different LGBT + groups in post-socialist spaces. How does lesbian anonymity shape the queer movements and why is it important to keep representational issues in mind while working on non-normative sexualities, gender, and women´s reproductive rights? This contribution offers a necessary critique of the representational gaps within queer movements.

Cultural evolution in adaptive management of grassroots activism in BC, Canada.

This paper demonstrates how implicit cultural evolution theory (CE) is used in adaptive management of grassroots campaigns of resistance against environmentally destructive industry and government to facilitate sustainable outcomes. For an action to be sustainable, it must be stable against political pressures. By bringing attention to the effects of social transmission-recruitment to a cause, learning across campaigns, and the transmission or cultivation of solidarity sentiments-cultural evolution presents a framework for tracking social dynamics essential for the sustainability of resistance projects. This is illustrated with examples from direct action grassroots activism in First Nations communities in northern British Columbia, Canada in the context of fights against unsustainable industrial projects. Specifically, grassroots activists work with an implicit CE theory of social transmission of values that posits that expansive, large-group organizing can get large numbers moderately committed to cause but that organizing focusing on small groups is more successful at transmitting intense commitment and adherence to First Nations norms. In the case of direct action resistance, such intense commitment is more vital than numbers for success. Further, grassroots activists have self-consciously developed institutions for the rapid transmission of policy innovations, accelerating the constructive evolution of tactics.

Predicting the Emergence of Community Psychology and Community Development in 91 Countries with Brief Case Studies of Chile and Ghana.

Using a mixed-method analysis, we propose and test a framework for predicting the international development of community psychology (CP) and community development (CD) as two examples of applied community-based research (CBR) disciplines aiming to link local knowledge generation with social change. Multiple regressions on an international sample of 91 countries were used to determine the relative influences of preexisting grassroots activism, population size, social and economic development, and civil liberties on estimates of the current strength of CP and CD based on Internet search and review of training courses and programs, published articles and journals, and professional organizations and conferences in these countries. Our results provide support for the proposed model and suggest that grassroots activism positively accounts for the development of CP and CD, above and beyond the influences of the other predictors. Brief qualitative case-study analyses of Chile (high CP, low CD) and Ghana (high CD, low CP) explore the limitations of our quantitative model and the importance of considering other historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and geographic factors for explaining the development of CP, CD, and other applied community studies.

Counter-Discourse Activism on Social Media: The Case of Challenging "Poverty Porn" Television.

In this paper we investigate how online counter-discourse is designed, deployed and orchestrated by activists to challenge dominant narratives around socio-political issues. We focus on activism related to the UK broadcast media's negative portrayal of welfare benefit claimants; portrayals characterised as "poverty porn" by critics. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore two activist campaigns countering the TV programme Benefits Street. Through content analysis of social media, associated traditional media texts, and interviews with activists, our analysis highlights the way activists leverage the specific technological affordances of different social media and other online platforms in order to manage and configure counter-discourse activities. We reveal how activists use different platforms to carefully control and contest discursive spaces, and the ways in which they utilise both online and offline activities in combination with new and broadcast media to build an audience for their work. We discuss the challenges associated with measuring the success of counter-discourse, and how activists rely on combinations of social media analytics and anecdotal feedback in order to ascertain that their campaigns are successful. We also discuss the often hidden power-relationships in such campaigns, especially where there is ambiguity regarding the grassroots legitimacy of activism, and where effort is placed into controlling and owning the propagation of counter-discourse. We conclude by highlighting a number of areas for further work around the blurred distinctions between corporate advocacy, digilantism and grassroots activism.