Student protest is often an engine of social change for sexual minorities and other oppressed groups. Through an analysis of college students in the Add Health survey (n=2, 534), we found that sexual minorities attend more political marches than heterosexuals. To understand why this sexuality difference occurs, we performed a logistic regression analysis to decipher the importance of four expla...

The outbreak of HIV in the early 1980s saw widespread activism among patients and community supporters. The author, a young physician in San Francisco at the time, describes how coming of age as a clinician in the midst of this activism affected her concept of the patient-physician relationship. The insistence of a particular patient, Robert, on specifying his treatment goals illustrates that e...

This article argues that “health activism” as a concept has been overlooked as an important element of health communication and situates the concept in relation to key areas of research in the field, including health citizenship and community organizing. The author presents theoretical frameworks for comparing and contrasting health-related social action based on issue focus and political orien...

The past decade has witnessed an emergent form of activism increasingly defined by its reliance on internet strategies, network social structures and participatory practices. Internet strategies employed by many contemporary activists include websites, listservs and hyperlinked networks used for exchanging information, mobilizing both old and new constituencies, and coordinating collective acti...

This study investigated whether believing beauty is a primary currency for women operates as an antecedent force in the relation between self-objectification and gender activism. Ninety-four ethnically diverse women attending a small liberal arts college in the southeastern United States completed the study questionnaires online for course credit. Preliminary results demonstrated beauty as curr...

This paper examines a large, nearly universal sample of hedge fund activism between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2005. Hedge fund activism is when a hedge fund files a 13D filing after taking an initial stake of 5 percent or more in the company, and clearly states in the filing’s “purpose” section that it intends to proactively influence management’s future decisions. We find that hedge fun...

There is widespread agreement that the process of election campaigning, particularly the roles of parties and the news media, have been transformed during recent decades. Many are concerned that these developments have generated widespread apathy, or even alienation, from the traditional modes of electoral participation in representative democracies. This tendency is thought to be particularly ...

This study investigates the mechanisms under which radical collective activism become politically salient. Although there have been numerous explanations for radical activism, little agreement exists concerning the specific mechanisms which underlie this process, especially in deeply divided societies and in those facing [perceived or real] political threats. I identify three important clusters...

Social media Web sites such as YouTube offer activists unique opportunities to reach out to new audiences through a variety of diverse appeals. Yet the rules of engagement on social media should depend on the structures, goals, and characteristics of the movements engaging in this outreach. To explore how differences in social movements translate into online activism, we employ a paired case st...

Party membership and activism is declining among Britain’s three major parties. Using individual membership survey data, evidence of this decline, particularly in party activism, is presented. Reasons for the decline are considered. It is suggested that choice-based rather than structural explanations are more persuasive. The impact of the decline upon the parties and the political system is co...