Schedule of Events

As a result of the 2016 presidential election, a constellation of niche-roots (Karpf 2009), progressively-oriented groups have emerged (Flippable, Our Revolution, Swing Left, and Indivisible) with the stated purpose challenging or retaking institutional power.  Using NodeXL (Smith 2014), we conduct a social network analysis of these groups' follower/following network over a three-month period (March to June 2017) to explore the composition and changes in the network dynamics of each niche roots organization.  We look at the network compactness, cluster formation, ratio of strong/weak ties and emergence of structural holes for each organization. Using these measures allows us to examine differences within and between groups in on-line network composition and allows us to identify the level of integration of the emerging #resistance activist twitter ecosystem.

Although Muslims in the US practice Islamic ritual requirements in the same way as their coreligionists around the world, this paper argues that the ritual practice of Muslims has been impacted in a variety of ways by the Islamophobic environment that has emerged most prominently post-9/11. This paper begins a conversation on Muslim Americans and their ritual practices. It asks how living as a vulnerable and marginalized religious minority in US society has affected the way some Muslims perform Islamic ritual practices in their daily lives, leading them sometimes to compromise their practices or to use them as a symbolic form of resistance.

This presentation examines how small, local organizations in the Dominican Republic and Curaçao navigate around education policies that restrict or eliminate access to culture and language instruction.  The goal of the presentation is two-fold: (1) to highlight the countries’ similarities surrounding how post-colonial biases against “otherness” and “blackness” negatively impact the content of school curricula, and (2) to highlight examples of how Dominican and Curaçaoan grassroots organizations seek to provide students and the wider community with cultural knowledge and linguistic skills that are vitally significant to the identity of many native-born members of the society.  The information included in this presentation is based on data collected through qualitative research methods:  participant observation, snowball sampling, in-depth interviews, and document analysis.  The preliminary findings are presented through a lens of critical race theory.