(PSM6) The Cultural Sources of Contemporary Social Movements

What cultural logics underlie contemporary social movements? How do movements draw on and modify cultural frames to mobilize support? And what is the role of political context in shaping how these dynamics unfold? The presentations in this session will broadly explore these questions by covering a range of substantive topics including conflict over gender and sexuality issues in Canada and in Taiwan, cultural framing of the global solidarity movement for East Timor, of BLM by right-wing conservative movements in America, and grassroots mobilization of the Trump movement. Tags: Culture, Politics, Social Movements

Organizers: Milos Brocic, McGill University, Galen Watts, University of Waterloo; Chairs: Milos Brocic, McGill University, Galen Watts, University of Waterloo

Presentations

Yi-Cheng Hsieh, McGill University

Parents' Rights, Children's Rights? Ideological Differences in the English-Canadian Media Coverage over the SOGI Curriculum Disputes and Protests

In the summer of 2023, the Higgs government in New Brunswick announced changes to Policy 713, asking parental consent before teachers use a child’s preferred pronoun; in September, the Moe government in Saskatchewan followed suit. Following these policy changes, the Parents Rights Coalition of Canada opposed the current Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) curriculum and orchestrated the 1 Million March 4 Children protests across provinces, with the goal of protecting children from what they saw as the premature indoctrination of sex/gender curriculum. In contrast, supporters of the SOGI curriculum staged counter-protests, advocating for the rights of transgender and gender diverse youth in schools and condemning misinformation dispersed maliciously. Meanwhile, the Saskatchewan court granted an injunction to pause the pronoun policy, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that the parents’ rights protests were ideas imported from the far right in the United States. This caused the Muslim Association of Canada to demand Trudeau to retract connections of hate and parents’ rights. As Trudeau implicitly indicated, the conflicts around the SOGI curriculum could be attributed as part of the “Culture War” thesis, that the ideological orientations and competing moral views amplify the right-left division. Among the processes of conflicts escalation, Canadian media outlets played a role in presenting, framing, and selecting facts, actions, and voices, shaping the contour and boundary of the Culture War on sex/gender diversity. This article explores how media outlets represent the SOGI curriculum dispute, aiming to estimate variations across provinces, ideological orientations, and coverage types. A second question examines whether expert-assessed scores of media ideology align with the topics media outlets select to cover. Based on expert-assessed scores, the Canadian Media System Survey categorizes media outlets to “liberal” as opposed to “conservative” in economic, social, and religious topics. However, the extent to which these subjective scores accurately represent the actual coverage of topics remains to be tested. I collect news data via the ProQuest platform (coverage in English), build a dataset with provincial and news type covariates, and incoporate ideological scores from the Canadian Media System Survey. I use natural language processing and textual analysis with standard preprocessing choices and employ structural topic model (STM) to incorporate covariates in estimating topics. Because the data on ideological scores are restricted, I run three different models (unrestricted, restricted without ideological scores, and the main model) and compare the results regarding the numbers and prevalence of topics. Results from unrestricted and restricted models are somewhat different; still, the restricted model is able to identify crucial topics about the protest confrontation and trans-youth’s narrative as distinct topics. The main model incorporates ideological scores in estimating topics, and results are more stable than the restricted model. I find that the ideological orientations are reflected in the topics selected by different media outlets, and these differences are shown in the news instead of the opinions pieces. The main model returns thirteen topics as optimal, with differences in provinces and ideological scopes of the media outlets. While both liberal and conservative outlets provide substantial coverage of protest confrontations, extremes on both sides also commented on the relation between Muslim communities and the SOGI curriculum. The liberal covers legislative and factual-check news, while the conservative justifies parents’ involvement in school curriculum. Notably, relatively neutral outlets cover more on trans youth’s narrative and their lives in school. Results also indicate that differences in news types are insignificant. When estimating topics on protest confrontations, Muslim connections, and trans-youth narrative, with ideological scores and news type jointly, the model suggests that it is news that demonstrates ideological difference. This article contributes to our knowledge of the media’s role in the Cultural War around gender/sexual diversity. It argues that the ideological preferences of media outlets manifest in the different topics covered within the same issue. Future research might use other social issues, such as labour strikes or immigration policies to further examine the correspondence between subjective and objective measurements of media ideology.  

Yu-Hsuan Sun, University of Toronto

"Rational, Scientific, Pragmatic" Misogynists? The Cultural-Institutional Rise of Taiwanese Presidential Candidate Ko Wen-Je.

The study discusses the rise of presidential candidate Ko Wen-Je, who won 26.54% of the votes as a third party in a traditionally bipartisan Taiwan. Kos election strategy relies on the image of being a decorated yet prudent surgeon prior to his entry into politics, as evidenced by his campaign slogan: "Rational, Scientific, Pragmatic." However, Ko is often accused of misogyny by political opponents due to his controversial public remarks on women. How has Ko Wen-Je managed to attract a new body of predominantly young, college-educated male voters, and who did this demographic vote for before voting for him? In an attempt to answer such questions, I argue that Taiwans educational institutions and technology sectors are conducive to fostering certain political attitudes among men that fall in line with Ko’s perspectives on politics, society, and gender. Specifically, Taiwan’s pursuit of economic and technological modernization has led to its adoption of impactful educational policies that encourage engineering careers and the study of STEM while also encouraging the gender-typing of specific fields of study and occupational roles. Within this context, STEM and ostensibly more prestigious fields are masculinized, while art and social sciences are feminized. Such policies have created classroom and work environments in which women are the minority. These conditions result in a body of highly educated men who are steadfastly loyal to science and technology but have very little exposure to women and their experiences. Using linear and non-linear modelling methods, the research plans to conduct online surveys among Kos supporters, asking questions about the themes described above, most notably their ideas and beliefs and how these relate to their occupation and/or field of study. The questions are designed to test the hypothesis advanced by this paper: the male-dominant basis for Ko’s support is linked to their educational background and work environments. The study has broader implications for the cultural sources of political behaviour. In particular, the author contributes to the ongoing debate on whether gender and gender ideology play a significant role in voting behaviour. Recent findings report an increasing divide between men and women over political ideology. For example, the Financial Times reports that the intra-generational ideological gap between men and women among Gen-Zs is widening in countries across continents. These divides have resulted in gendered preferences for politicians. The recent election in Taiwan is part of the global phenomenon of certain candidates appealing to male voters in light of the widening ideological gap. Finally, this paper suggests that gender ideologies may have institutional roots. Ko’s support among college-educated men challenges the prevailing thesis that educational attainment leads to liberal gender beliefs. Tracing Taiwan’s gender ideologies to the unintended consequences of modernization, the study attempts to shed light on the role of gender, which is often ignored in modernization theory and the developmental state literature.

Julian Torelli, McMaster University

Discursive Opportunities and the Motivational Framing of Human-Rights Activism for East Timor

Drawing from previously untapped archival data, our research undertakes a crossnational analysis to understand how critical organizations within the global solidarity movement for East Timor in Canada, the United States, and Australia adapted their human-rights claims and rhetorical interventions to their specific national contexts to produce politically and culturally resonant motivational frames aligned with their states’ discourses of national identity and foreign policy to support humanitarian intervention in East Timor. We identify crossnational differences in the framing of their political discourse: (1) Canadian groups mobilized a humanitarian-peacekeeping frame, (2) U.S. solidarity groups tapped into a democratic-exceptionalist frame, and (3) Australian activists drew from a remembrance-moral debt frame. We conclude by underscoring the importance of discursive opportunities and national historical contexts for studying the mobilization of human rights and crossnational variations in motivational framing.

Devon Wright, Metropolitan State University of Denver

Using Anti-communism to Discredit Black Protest

This research seeks to understand the propaganda media campaigns of two contemporaneous conservative rightwing social movement organizations (CRSMO) in the United States from the Cold War-civil rights decades, with slight but significant variation in the contours of their ideology concerning their opposition to Black protest against racial injustice. The segregationist Confederate nationalist, Citizen’s Councils of America (CCA), and the Americanist ultra-nationalist, John Birch Society (JBS), both anchored their distaste for racial egalitarianism to the politics of anti-communism and attempted to discredit Black liberation movements as a communist conspiracy against American freedom. Both CRSMOs had highly sophisticated propaganda media platforms aimed at swaying public opinion in the direction of their movement ideology. I contend it is worth comparing the propaganda media messaging of the CCA and JBS to understand changes and adaptations in conservative right-wing rhetoric against Black demands for racial justice to better make sense of current opposition to BLM and the recent hysteria in America over critical race theory (CRT), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and anti-racist efforts more broadly. No different from liberal progressive social movement organizations, CRSMOs engage in messaging campaigns for the purpose of increasing membership, garnering public support for their cause, gaining financial backing to sustain themselves, and influencing legislative outcomes in the direction of their preferred vision of society. Fundamental to these media campaigns is defining for the public the specific problem for which they offer their ideology as the solution. Both the CCA and JBS shared a culturally traditionalist vision of society under threat from an insidious foreign communist conspiracy aimed at unraveling civil order in America to usher in a new age of tyranny. Where the two differed in their anti-communist opposition to Black protest is the subject for examination here. I argue that the CCA’s use of anti-communism represented a declining conservative rightwing rhetorical strategy of using overt forms of anti-Black racism to defend its traditionalist vision of society while the JBS, not dedicated to the segregationist cause, displayed a form of anti-communist anti-Blackness more in line with conservative rightwing media today in their attempts to discredit the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as anti-American through the use of the ‘Marxist’ label. Where the CCA’s Confederate nationalist anti-communism was defined by notions of inherent Black inferiority as a danger to be unleashed upon America if the communists were successful in their subversive goals, the JBS’s Americanist ultra nationalist anti-communism exhibited indirect, supposedly ‘race neutral’ rhetoric against Black protest, which reflects conservative rightwing messaging tactics against Black protest in the BLM era. Since both the CCA and JBS relied on what Noakes (2000:672 and 2005:106), refers to as the “counter subversive anticommunist frame,” I use social movement frame theory to develop a conceptual model of how conservative rightwing anti-racial egalitarian political philosophy has been shaped by anti-communism from the mid-20th century civil rights-Black Power movements to the current 21st century BLM period. In my theorization, I propose a concept I call, conservative rightwing countersubversive framing , a propaganda strategy by CRSMOs which sees any racial egalitarian efforts emerging as a force to be reckoned with, as fundamentally counter to dominant racial norms of systemic inequality and foundational anti-Blackness.

Catharina O'Donnell, Harvard

Losing the Electoral Battle to Win the Culture War: The Trump Movement and the Rightward Shift of the Republican Grassroots

How can we explain Donald Trump's historically unprecedented resurgence and the accompanying right-ward shift of the Republican Party? Most research on grassroots conservatism in the US focuses on Republican strongholds or competitive "swing" states (Russell Hochschild 2016; Ternullo 2024). This election-focused approach overlooks an important puzzle: some of the most fervent conservative mobilization arises from staunchly progressive regions where Democrats dominate electorally. Through a mixed-methods quantitative and ethnographic analysis of the grassroots Trump movement, I examine how local political contexts shape the cultural logics and tactical repertoires of social movements. I begin with a quantitative analysis of county-level right-wing mobilization across the United States. I then conduct comparative ethnography of grassroots Republican mobilization in swing-state New Hampshire and deep-blue Massachusetts.