Virtual Library

In 2014, Black Lives Matter (BLM) ignited an urgent national conversation about police killings of unarmed Black citizens. Online tools have been anecdotally credited as critical in this effort, but researchers are only beginning to evaluate this claim. This research report examines the movement’s uses of online media in 2014 and 2015. To do so, we analyze three types of data: 40.8 million tweets, over 100,000 web links, and 40 interviews of BLM activists and allies.

Liberal and marxist theories of civil society contain a conceptual paradox of `civil society without citizenship'. This article shows how the paradox about civil society comes about through an under-theorization of the multivalent character of citizenship and rights, which in turn reflects a rather impoverished understanding of culture, discourse and symbolization. The discussion starts with two related questions about civil society: (1) where is the locus of citizenship in classical liberal and marxist theories of civil society; and (2) what implication does the conventional state-civil society distinction have for the notion of citizenship as a category of status and agency? It further distinguishes among three different theses of state-civil society relations in the two different theoretical traditions. The article will conclude by outlining an alternative theoretical strategy whereby to go beyond the conceptual impasse and to meet the challenge of globalization.

From an analysis of actual cases, three categories of bias in computer systems have been developed: preexisting, technical, and emergent. Preexisting bias has its roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. Technical bias arises from technical constraints of considerations. Emergent bias arises in a context of use. Although others have pointed to bias inparticular computer systems and have noted the general problem, we know of no comparable work that examines this phenomenon comprehensively and which offers a framework for understanding and remedying it. We conclude by suggesting that freedom from bias should by counted amoung the select set of criteria—including reliability, accuracy, and efficiency—according to which the quality of systems in use in society should be judged.

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impacts. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race; (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines; and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This Article’s central claim is that these strategies are at best superficial and at worst counterproductive because the source of racial inequality in risk assessment lies neither in the input data, nor in a particular algorithm, nor in algorithmic methodology per se. The deep problem is the nature of prediction itself. All prediction looks to the past to make guesses about future events. In a racially stratified world, any method of prediction will project the inequalities of the past into the future. This is as true of the subjective prediction that has long pervaded criminal justice as it is of the algorithmic tools now replacing it. Algorithmic risk assessment has revealed the inequality inherent in all prediction, forcing us to confront a problem much larger than the challenges of a new technology. Algorithms, in short, shed new light on an old problem.

Ultimately, the Article contends, redressing racial disparity in prediction will require more fundamental changes in the way the criminal justice system conceives of and responds to risk. The Article argues that criminal law and policy should, first, more clearly delineate the risks that matter and, second, acknowledge that some kinds of risk may be beyond our ability to measure without racial distortion—in which case they cannot justify state coercion. Further, to the extent that we can reliably assess risk, criminal system actors should strive whenever possible to respond to risk with support rather than restraint. Counterintuitively, algorithmic risk assessment could be a valuable tool in a system that supports the risky.

This article examines the intersection of two structural developments: the growth of surveillance and the rise of “big data.” Drawing on observations and interviews conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department, I offer an empirical account of how the adoption of big data analytics does—and does not—transform police surveillance practices. I argue that the adoption of big data analytics facilitates amplifications of prior surveillance practices and fundamental transformations in surveillance activities. First, discretionary assessments of risk are supplemented and quantified using risk scores. Second, data are used for predictive, rather than reactive or explanatory, purposes. Third, the proliferation of automatic alert systems makes it possible to systematically surveil an unprecedentedly large number of people. Fourth, the threshold for inclusion in law enforcement databases is lower, now including individuals who have not had direct police contact. Fifth, previously separate data systems are merged, facilitating the spread of surveillance into a wide range of institutions. Based on these findings, I develop a theoretical model of big data surveillance that can be applied to institutional domains beyond the criminal justice system. Finally, I highlight the social consequences of big data surveillance for law and social inequality.

We apply the concept of “biopolitical citizenship” to show how and with what consequences biology and medicine are mobilized as political techniques in the legal immigration procedures of permanent residency acquisition and family reunification. Medical examinations and DNA testing are employed by the U.S. state as objective sorting criteria in the immigration legal process. Based on qualitative examination of immigrants' and their attorneys' participation in the legalization process, we demonstrate how these biological screening mechanisms create added uncertainty and problems that disproportionately affect particular people. In this context, aspiring citizens undergo biological evaluations that appear transparent, objective, and democratic. However, because of how evaluations are structured, they actually lower the chances of certain individuals to succeed in their citizenship endeavors.

This article deals with the problems of North Korean defectors currently living in South Korea. In the past, most such defectors came from privileged groups in the North Korean population, and their adjustment to the new environment did not pose a significant problem. However, from the mid-1990s, defectors began to come from the far less privileged groups. They experience serious problems related to jobs, education, crime, and social adjustment. Recent years have seen a dramatic but not always openly stated change in the official South Korean attitude toward defectors: from a policy explicitly aimed at encouraging defection, Seoul has moved to the policy of quietly discouraging it. There are fears that encouraging defection will undermine the policy of peaceful engagement with the North. There is also the perception that refugees are outsiders, not quite adjustable to the conditions of South Korean society and thus a social and budgetary burden.

Paul Bontemps decided to move his family to Los Angeles from Louisiana in 1906 on the day he finally submitted to a strictly enforced Southern custom—he stepped off the sidewalk to allow white men who had just insulted him to pass by. Friends of the Bontemps family, like many others beckoning their loved ones West, had written that Los Angeles was "a city called heaven" for people of color. But just how free was Southern California for African Americans? This splendid history, at once sweeping in its historical reach and intimate in its evocation of everyday life, is the first full account of Los Angeles's black community in the half century before World War II. Filled with moving human drama, it brings alive a time and place largely ignored by historians until now, detailing African American community life and political activism during the city's transformation from small town to sprawling metropolis. Writing with a novelist's sensitivity to language and drawing from fresh historical research, Douglas Flamming takes us from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, through the Great Migration, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the build-up to World War II. Along the way, he offers rich descriptions of the community and its middle-class leadership, the women who were front and center with men in the battle against racism in the American West. In addition to drawing a vivid portrait of a little-known era, Flamming shows that the history of race in Los Angeles is crucial for our understanding of race in America. The civil rights activism in Los Angeles laid the foundation for critical developments in the second half of the century that continue to influence us to this day.

Digital space has provided an important platform for women by enabling them to defy religious and patriarchal values while rendering their demands more visible in the public sphere. By analyzing the stories of 3349 murdered women, consulting 57 activist‐published materials, studying 37 protest‐focused videos, and using digital ethnography, this article explores Turkish women's struggles against femicide. I propose the emancipatory and democratizing counterpublics as an analytical concept to demonstrate how women challenge epistemic injustice and male violence. To this end, I investigate the struggles of women by studying their use of digital space as a means of breaking the silence on femicide, creating data, disseminating knowledge, and seeking justice. This article highlights the essential role of new media technologies in empowering vulnerable groups through the generation of new forms of knowledge, the formation of collective memory, and the elimination of epistemic injustice in opposition to the ruling authorities. The present study contributes to our knowledge of the sociology of epistemic injustice by demonstrating how digital space plays a limited but critical role in the efforts of activists living under authoritarian regimes to defend their fundamental rights to survive and prevent femicide, which has a devastating impact on the lives of millions of women.

A growing body of research has revealed a rapid expansion in transnational organizing and activism, but we know relatively little about the qualitative changes these transnational ties represent. Using surveys of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and additional case study material, this paper examines the extent to which these organizations have been able to articulate strategic frames that motivate global level organizing and collective action. The analysis also investigates how inequities between the global North and South affect TSMO solidarity. Key findings are that, while TSMOs have helped expand routine communications among geographically dispersed memberships, there is also evidence that they have developed new skills for managing the differences that characterize such memberships. But gaps between Northern and Southern members persist, particularly regarding groups' abilities to relate local concerns to global level campaigns. Another concern is that, while TSMOs help integrate new groups into global political processes, expanding participation in global activism may foster even greater diversity and conflict among social change groups working in global arenas. Transnational groups have been better at cultivating shared understandings of the problems they address than at building consensus around a shared response to these problems.