The Transformative Capacity of Commemorating Violent Pasts: Exploring Local Commemoration of the ìMississippi Burningî Murders.

Philadelphia, Mississippi—the city notorious for the violence, denial, and collective obstruction of justice surrounding the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers—is now hailed as a beacon of racial reconciliation. How and why this unexpected transformation took place is the question motivating this dissertation. My central hypothesis is that the public commemoration in Philadelphia in 2004 holds the key to understanding this phenomenon. To explore this hypothesis, I identify three racially significant institutional outcomes of the 2004 commemorations in Philadelphia—the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a statewide truth commission, and a bill mandating civil rights education—and evaluate whether and how these outcomes can be causally attributed to the 2004 commemoration. Drawing on archival, interview, and observational data, I employ event structure analysis to reconstruct the causal pathways leading to each outcome. After finding sufficient evidence to suggest that each transformation can be causally related to the 2004 commemoration, I then compare the 2004 commemoration to a similar commemoration that took place in Philadelphia in 1989. Through this comparison, I examine which factors present in 2004, but not in 1989, that enabled the 2004 commemoration to facilitate these transformative outcomes. This dissertation suggests that the 2004 commemoration helped catalyze the Killen trial, truth commission, and education bill by mobilizing a new generation of mnemonic entrepreneurs, strengthening the community’s mnemonic capacity, shifting local and state-level opportunity structures, and transforming the local political culture. This study also suggests that the way a commemoration is put together matters for it’s outcomes. Compared to the 1989 commemoration, the 2004 commemoration more deeply engaged Philadelphia’s African American counterpublic and created a more inclusive planning process that enabled organizers to develop social solidarity, and later, a distinct organizational identity and infrastructure. This study thus engages larger questions of theoretical concern regarding how commemorations of violent pasts actually work and whether they can transform the often contested and tragic conditions from which they emerge. Furthermore, this study provides a unique lens through which to explore the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and continuing efforts for racial justice.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113346/1/cwhitlin_1.pd

From Countermemory to Collective Memory: Acknowledging the “Mississippi Burning” Murders

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111921/1/socf12182.pd

International human rights law and social movements: States' resistance and civil society's insistence

This review examines recent scholarship on the rise of international human rights law and proposes that social movements have played critical roles both in elevating the standards of human rights in international law and in leveraging these standards into better local practices. Institutionalization of universal human rights principles began in the immediate post–World War II period, in which civil society actors worked with powerful states to establish human rights as a key guiding principle of the international community and to ensure the actors' continuing participation in international human rights institutions. The subsequent decades saw various hurdles arise in international politics, but civil society actors skillfully used the small openings that they had gained to continue to advance the cause of human rights. They held powerful governments accountable to their lofty promises about human rights and worked with sympathetic governments in the UN system to continuously upgrade the standards of international human rights. They also leveraged human rights laws toward better local practices, taking advantage of new political opportunities created by human rights laws, using expanding international channels to increase flows of human and material resources, embracing globally legitimated vocabularies of human rights to frame their movements, and integrating the broad cultural effects of human rights laws to construct new social movement identity and actorhood. The review then points out some potential pitfalls of international human rights laws: professionalization of movement actors, which can undermine the impact of social movements and lead to less ambitious and transformative goals; privileging of some causes over others, which can lead to demobilization around certain issues; and overextending movement goals, which can give rise to strong backlash against human rights principles.</jats:p

Seeking Abraham: A Report of Furman University\u27s Task Force on Slavery and Justice

After more than a year of study, the Furman University Task Force on Slavery and Justice presents its findings in this report. The report includes the Task Force’s values and process, a presentation of the history of Furman’s early ties to slavery, a number of short vignettes by individual Task Force members, and a number of recommendations for the university to address. Members of the Task Force represent diverse students and alumni, as well as faculty and staff. The report is the result of commissioning a history, activating student research projects, hosting scholars who consulted with the Task Force, creating oral histories and curating viewpoints, and attending Universities Studying Slavery, a consortium headquartered at the University of Virginia with more than 40 international colleges and universities. The university has made a commitment to serious consideration of the entire report

The Extent and Coverage of Current Knowledge of Connected Health: Systematic Mapping Study

Background: This paper examines the development of the Connected Health research landscape with a view on providing a historical perspective on existing Connected Health research. Connected Health has become a rapidly growing research field as our healthcare system is facing pressured to become more proactive and patient centred. Objective: We aimed to identify the extent and coverage of the current body of knowledge in Connected Health. With this, we want to identify which topics have drawn the attention of Connected health researchers, and if there are gaps or interdisciplinary opportunities for further research. Methods: We used a systematic mapping study that combines scientific contributions from research on medicine, business, computer science and engineering. We analyse the papers with seven classification criteria, publication source, publication year, research types, empirical types, contribution types research topic and the condition studied in the paper. Results: Altogether, our search resulted in 208 papers which were analysed by a multidisciplinary group of researchers. Our results indicate a slow start for Connected Health research but a more recent steady upswing since 2013. The majority of papers proposed healthcare solutions (37%) or evaluated Connected Health approaches (23%). Case studies (28%) and experiments (26%) were the most popular forms of scientific validation employed. Diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and heart conditions are among the most prevalent conditions studied. Conclusions: We conclude that Connected Health research seems to be an established field of research, which has been growing strongly during the last five years. There seems to be more focus on technology driven research with a strong contribution from medicine, but business aspects of Connected health are not as much studied

The Abandoned Promise of Civil Rights

Fifty years after the civil rights movement, ethnic and racial disparities persist and have even widened across a number of socioeconomic indicators. When compared against whites, nonwhites today fare about the same or worse than their counterparts of the past in educational and occupational attainment, income and earnings, wealth, unemployment and underemployment. How can we understand the failure of racial and ethnic minority groups to attain socioeconomic parity with non-Hispanic whites following one of the most progressive eras of American race relations? Contemporary economic and political approaches are often considered separately and offer different explanations. What they share in common, however, is a tendency to downplay the salience of race as a significant factor that conditions the life chances of nonwhites in the post-civil rights era. This article introduces a critical race perspective to redirect this conversation. This approach starts from the premise that the social structure of the United States is highly stratified by race, which conditions racially unequal outcomes. In the post-civil rights era, color-blind racism is the hegemonic ideology, discourse, and practice, which justifies persistent racial inequality. The development of a color-blind ideology reflects this historical moment and the larger political and economic context; thus, its development is consistent with the political shift toward neoconservatism and the economic transition to neoliberalism. Taken together, these social forces foster the reproduction of a racialized social system characterized by persistent racial inequality that is observed in the post-civil rights era