#MeToo as Catalyst: A Glimpse into 21st Century Activism

The Twitter hashtag #MeToo has provided an accessible medium for users to share their personal experiences and make public the prevalence of sexual harassment, assault, and violence against women. This online phenomenon, which has largely involved posting on Twitter and “retweeting” to share other’s posts has revealed crucial information about the scope and nature of sexual harassment and misconduct. More specifically, social media has served as a central forum for this unprecedented global conversation, where previously silenced voices have been amplified, supporters around the world have been united, and resistance has gained steam. This Essay discusses the #MeToo movement within the broader context of social media activism, explaining how this unique form of collective action is rapidly evolving. We offer empirical insights into the types of conversations taking place under the hashtag and the extent to which the movement is leading to broader social change. While it is unclear which changes are sustainable over time, it is clear that the hashtag #MeToo has converted an online phenomenon into tangible change, sparking legal, political, and social changes in the short run. This Essay provides data to illustrate some of these changes, which demonstrate how posting online can serve as an impetus, momentum, and legitimacy for broader movement activity and changes offline more characteristic of traditional movement strategies

Course outline in English for grade nine and illustrative correlated units.

Units included: 1. Put your best foot forward, (Orientation). 2. High adventures. 3. All about you, (Autobiographies). 4. What's on the air? 5. Our town. 6. What's the news? 7. Getting yourself on paper, (Letter-writing). 8. Sidelines for you, (Hobbies). 9. Folk-lore of the south. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

#BlackLivesMatter: From Protest to Policy

We find that the protests of 2020 did indeed begin a paradigm shift in the social awareness of racialized police violence, and this important and significant social change has in turn already inspired political change and some degree of legal and policy change. However, the movement remains in a precarious position and it is uncertain how enduring these changes will be. While many state legislators and local officials have responded to the protests with policy reforms, policy action at the federal level is mostly stalled. In addition, it is unclear whether the state and local policy changes will lead to the deeper and lasting structural changes sought by the movement. We are also observing substantial backlash policy that threatens to not only derail current racial justice efforts, but also exacerbate the underlying inequalities that the movement opposes

Contemporary Black Women\u27s Voting Rights Activism: Some Historical Perspective

As the United States arrived at the brink of the 2020 election, three interdisciplinary scholars engaged in a panel discussion about why and how Black women of all classes have been at the forefront of movements for civil rights and economic justice. Based on their expertise on race, gender, and class, and scholarly backgrounds in history, labor studies, and political science, this paper presents perspectives on the critical role of Black women in simultaneously fighting for the right to vote, while protesting the disenfranchisement of all African Americans from the Reconstruction Era to the present. The paper discusses why and how previously marginalized groups have struggled to gain inclusion in the American political system, and how the efforts of Black women have shaped and prodded efforts to build a more democratic nation

#BlackLivesMatter—Getting from Contemporary Social Movements to Structural Change

From the haters and hackers to propaganda and privacy concerns, social media often deserves its bad reputation. But the sustained activism that followed George Floyd’s death and the ongoing movement for racial justice also demonstrated how social media can be a crucial mechanism of social change. We saw how online and on-the-ground activism can fuel each other and build momentum in ways neither can achieve in isolation. We have seen in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and more specifically the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, a new and powerful approach to using social media that goes beyond symbolic “slacktivism” and performative allyship to mobilizing people for social and cultural change. In this essay, we use empirical data to support a new theoretical model that illustrates how contemporary movements can use social media to build awareness, educate, and most importantly, promote the kinds of offline action that can lead to deeper structural change. In this case, BLM effectively leveraged social media to fuel and facilitate mass protests and broaden social awareness. In 2020-21, we have seen this begin to inspire deeper social, cultural, and legal change, in ways that previously felt like distant hope

#BlackLivesMatter: From Protest to Policy

In summer 2020, mass protests spread across the globe challenging police brutality and racial injustice and demanding change. Fueled by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, these protests drew 15 million to 26 million participants in the United States alone to participate in late May and June of 2020. The sheer scale of these protests made them the largest movement in U.S. history. While there has been some consensus that this unprecedented protest movement pushed social awareness and changed the national conversation around race, existing research has yet to clearly document the extent to which it affected law and policy on the federal, state, and local levels. We begin to fill this gap by documenting the correlation between the online and offline protest activity, and showing the relationship between the location and intensity of protest activity and the initial wave of legal and policy change. In this Article, we use Twitter conversation and protest data to show how BLM fueled global protests that changed minds, hearts, and the baseline understanding of inequality in ways that could also ultimately drive legal and policy change. We then focus on the relationship between protest and activism in the summer of 2020 and legal and policy changes occurring across states and cities over the following year. We find that the protests of 2020 did indeed begin a paradigm shift in the social awareness of racialized police violence, and this important and significant social change has in turn already inspired political change and some degree of legal and policy change. However, the movement remains in a precarious position and it is uncertain how enduring these state and local policy changes will be and whether they will lead to the deeper and lasting structural changes sought by the movement. We are also observing substantial backlash policy that threatens to not only derail current racial justice efforts, but also exacerbate the underlying inequalities that the movement opposes. In Part I, we offer an analysis of the 2020 protests, including the critical role of social media in building the protests themselves as well as the policy demands that the protests helped to broadcast. In Part II, we assess the policy activity occurring within the first year following this historic level of activism in the United States, looking specifically at where and when legislators responded to three different kinds of movement demands: individual accountability, institutional changes, and broader systemic reform

Pareto Probing: Trading Off Accuracy for Complexity

The question of how to probe contextual word representations for linguistic structure in a way that is both principled and useful has seen significant attention recently in the NLP literature. In our contribution to this discussion, we argue for a probe metric that reflects the fundamental trade-off between probe complexity and performance: the Pareto hypervolume. To measure complexity, we present a number of parametric and non-parametric metrics. Our experiments using Pareto hypervolume as an evaluation metric show that probes often do not conform to our expectations---e.g., why should the non-contextual fastText representations encode more morpho-syntactic information than the contextual BERT representations? These results suggest that common, simplistic probing tasks, such as part-of-speech labeling and dependency arc labeling, are inadequate to evaluate the linguistic structure encoded in contextual word representations. This leads us to propose full dependency parsing as a probing task. In support of our suggestion that harder probing tasks are necessary, our experiments with dependency parsing reveal a wide gap in syntactic knowledge between contextual and non-contextual representations.Comment: Tiago Pimentel and Naomi Saphra contributed equally to this work. Camera ready version of EMNLP 2020 publication. Code available in https://github.com/rycolab/pareto-probin