Scholars consider news media coverage an important factor in understanding social movements' success. Some organizations are more successful in gaining coverage than others. Scholars suggest this relates to organizational characteristics, political contexts, and journalists' media routines and news values. Media coverage can be further distinguished into substantive or favorable coverage as defined by organizations getting not just mentioned, but quoted and getting their claims or demands in coverage. Moreover, local media differ from national media in their focus on local voices and actors. But, what does local media coverage of a national movement look like in local contests? When reporters have access to national, state affiliated, or local organizations, which organizations speak for the movement? Do journalistic news values and routines apply uniformly to all movement actors in coverage?

This study addresses these questions using a content analysis of 1113 newspaper articles appearing across 8 daily capital city newspapers ranging in dates from 2000-2011. Using data from the content analysis a small dataset was created for statistical analysis. This study finds that organizational characteristics, tactics, political contexts, and journalists' routines and news values influence the quality and quantity of coverage that organizations receive. Overall, local organizations dominate coverage, especially during legislative and public referendum fights. However, coverage tends to focus on just a small handful of local organizations and coverage is subject to a rigorous balancing norm. These are either established local organizations or newly formed issue specific coalition organizations. National organizations appear more consistently than state affiliated organizations, but the quality of their coverage is best in judicial contests and limited in legislative and referendum contests. An examination of other actors in coverage reveals that not all movement coverage is rigorously balanced like organizations' coverage. Religious organizations, bystanders, and the photographs accompanying coverage are unbalanced. These results indicate that organizational characteristics, tactics, political contexts and local journalists' priorities influence local news media coverage outcomes. Further, some elements of a movements' coverage can escape the strong balancing norm to provide valuable opportunities for favorable coverage.

This dissertation examines the process of parental acceptance for gay men in India and the US. In academic literature and public discourse, parental acceptance of gay men is often seen as a linear, albeit often gradual, process. However, interviews with gay men conducted for this study show that this acceptance waxes and wanes in patterned ways. It is found that gay men often experience *contextual* parental acceptance. Acceptance becomes weaker or stronger at different points and stages in the life course and in different interactional settings. Parental acceptance becomes stronger or diminished in these contexts depending on how gay men’s parents respond to the forces of heteronormativity and homonormativity, and whether gay men align with the racial normativity while experiencing their sexuality, in these time and spatial contexts. This study also explicates the role of parents’ agency, and the idiosyncrasies in how spatial contexts unfold, to explain how the forces of heteronormativity in spatial contexts produce behavioral outcomes on acceptance differently from different parents. Finally, this study incorporates the experiences of queer gay men from India to show that the understanding of parental acceptance through the lenses of homonormativity is more exclusive to American national culture. Parental acceptance in the Indian national culture is better understood through how queerness, in addition to homonormativity, shapes gay men’s perceptions of parental acceptance.

In years since Roe v. Ward abortion care has evolved in response to changes affecting healthcare more broadly (Halfmann 2012). Features of this newer model of healthcare provision, which is heavily influenced by managed care, include a strict division of job duties, practices that maximize efficiency and revenue, and organizational cultures that prioritize doctors’ authority and expertise but also strive to meet the demands of insurance and state reimbursement structures. Scholarly and public attention have most often focused on the doctors who perform abortions. Yet one of the key changes wrought by the reorganization of medical care more generally has been the growing role of medical assistants in the provision of abortion. Medical assistants are increasingly being incorporated into healthcare as they provide less expensive labor than doctors and nurses.These workers, I find, do not have the prior commitment to reproductive rights that doctors and nurses have. Based on 18 months of ethnographic observation at a busy abortion clinic in Southern California, my dissertation addresses how institutional changes have shaped abortion work today and address the following questions: How is abortion both similar to and different from typical healthcare? What are the implications for lower-status workers?

I find the modern arrangement of abortion does little to recognize the diverse needs of low status workers nor does it account for the extra emotional work these workers do as they contend with the moral complexities of abortion. I argue that clinics’ efforts to treat abortion as similar to other healthcare procedures ends up downplaying the undeniably politicized aspect of abortion. If we act as if abortion is like any other healthcare service without considering how abortion work is quite different from other forms of healthcare, then abortion work loses an important connection to the politics of abortion. It is a connection, I conclude, that may be particularly important for lower status workers as they make sense of their roles in abortion care.

Consensus decision-making is a horizontal decision-making practice used by activists in the United States, Germany and other countries. Scholars tend to address consensus as a uniform practice and have heavily criticized it. Nevertheless, consensus decision-making has only increased in its frequency of use and its reach. Which raises the questions: How have activists’ consensus-decision making practices changed over the many historical eras in which it has been practiced? How do activists in different nations come to practice consensus with a common approach and what explains differences in their practice? And, have contemporary activists approached consensus in ways that have effectively resolved the dilemmas of consensus identified by scholars? To investigate these questions I employ Eliasoph and Lichterman’s theoretical framework of group style, which refers to culture in interaction, as observed in the norms members of civic organizations hold for how they are expected to behave, speak, relate to outsiders, and make claims. Drawing upon 60 semi-structured interviews that I conducted with activists in the US and Germany, historical analysis, and the lens of group style, I have found that that activists are more flexible in their use of consensus than scholars expect.

My analysis reveals that activists are able to adapt consensus decision-making through group style, in response to the missteps of past generations and the circumstances of their current context. However, there are limitations to the extent to which activists may adapt consensus because their commitment to consensus is ultimately ideological. Because group style can be shared by many groups, movements, and nations it is of great relevance when attempting to understand how the same practices and perspectives come to be shared by German and American activists. Considering that group style is an element of culture, it is useful for understanding how activists’ commitment to consensus is enduring, even when it may not always be the most effective way to make decisions. Group style can enable activists to address the dilemmas of consensus, but it can also mask them and therefor prevent activists from accurately assessing and addressing the shortcomings of consensus.

How and when do journalists define the boundaries of acceptable controversy? And how do they do so while appearing to remain objective? To answer these questions, this research analyzes mainstream newspaper coverage of the American abortion debate from 1972 through 1994. Using qualitative content analyses and quantitative regression analyses, I explore how journalists rhetorically position themselves and other actors in news stories. More specifically, I analyze the use of analytic and outraged rhetoric in stories about the abortion controversy. I identify the actors who are ascribed analytic rhetoric or outrage rhetoric, as well as when journalists themselves use such rhetoric. I compare these uses across article characteristics and political contexts, as well as over time.

Findings show that to perform their objectivity, journalists adopt one of two roles: either that of neutral observer or that of guardian of consensus. Scholars have studied the first role but not the second. Both of these journalistic performances violate commitments to objectivity by implying certain conflicts and contenders are legitimate and others are beyond the pale of political acceptability. By serving as neutral observers and by serving as guardians of consensus journalists enact their commitment to objectivity not by being impartial but by being partial (to their understanding of shared public values). Ironically, however, when adhering to the norms of the guardianship of consensus, journalists undermine the paradigms of “objective journalism” (i.e., facticity, independence, balance) and a democratic public sphere (i.e., civil, representative or inclusive, and dialogic). In addition to this consequence, these performances also treat different groups of actors as either co-representatives of the public interest or as illegitimate challengers to those interests.

Despite federal guidelines prioritizing the inclusion of minorities in clinical research, experts still struggle with how to convince people from underrepresented communities to volunteer in essential research. Motivated by ethical concerns and pragmatism, partnering with local communities is championed by recruitment experts as an effective strategy to address cultural and structural barriers to participation and encourage research enrollment among underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. In this study, I investigate how partnership, a key term in participatory research approaches, which emphasize the greater involvement of local people, is understood and enacted by biomedical researchers and ordinary people. I use qualitative methods to investigate how researchers’ efforts to engender trust through partnerships with minority communities are experienced in practice by the people they aim to recruit. My analysis is drawn from 30 interviews with health researchers, a content analysis of public documents from a biomedical initiative using partnered approaches, and focus groups and interviews with 60 Latinx residents of Greater Los Angeles, California. I show that although partnering with local communities is a common method for involving minority groups in research, partnerships are enacted and understood by researchers in varying and distinct ways, with partnership ideals often challenging to carry out. In all models of partnership, researchers assume that these relationships promote trust and encourage ordinary people to frame research participation as a form of civic engagement and social solidarity. However, this is rarely how vulnerable people frame research or why they volunteer. More often, I found that people do not draw a clear distinction between research and healthcare, with medical care experiences intimately connected to people’s attitudes toward biomedical research. Community residents saw “participant partnerships” as confusing and tokenism to feign equality where it did not exist. Researchers and residents had drastically different understandings about what their obligations and entitlements were vis a vis each other, leading to conflicting relationship expectations and different symbolic valuations of monetary incentives. I conclude that increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in biomedical research depends on recognizing the different ways that people think about and act on relationships within the U.S. health care system.

We live in an uncertain social world. For many people, the future feels, and frequently is, indeterminant. Climate change, technological change, demographic change, and cultural change all make it difficult to tell where society is headed. Since it is our collective actions which will shape society’s future, it is more important than ever to reflect on the nature of uncertainty and its impacts on those actions. How exactly does uncertainty impact action? In particular, how does uncertainty about society's future bear upon risk-mitigating collective action? Knight (1921) defined “uncertainty” as a state in which one does not know, does not know what one does not know, and may not even know that one does not know. Uncertainty therefore presents a challenge for rational action because it suggests there are many situations in which an informed decision is impossible.

“Preppers” are a growing lifestyle movement and subculture who believe that major disasters are unavoidable, and that the world as we know it will end soon. Preppers spend impressive amounts of time, money, and energy attempting to mitigate these imagined risks. They learn about various disasters, stockpile large amounts of supplies, buy specialized gear, and learn numerous survival “skillsets.” Preppers go to great lengths to prepare for disasters that most of us don’t even consider. Therefore, preppers offer a strategic case for unpacking the mechanisms through which societal uncertainty is translated into collective action. Preppers force us to attend to: a) the prevalence, scope, and interconnectedness of real, present-day, society-threatening uncertainties, and b) the way social and cultural forces clearly shape representations of society’s future.

Drawing on 5 years of participant observation with preppers in Southern California and on YouTube, I argue that preppers imagine future disasters in order to reconstruct uncertainty into risks to be avoided. In doing so, they make lines of seemingly rational action apparent. In other words, uncertainty requires preppers to use their imaginations, social interactions, and pieces of culture to make mental representations of an unknown future. This means professedly rational decisions are invariably embedded in webs of social status and cultural and moral significance.

I explore this more fully in chapter one, which draws on my fieldwork with preppers during the Covid-19 pandemic to discuss the relationship between uncertainty, risk, and rationality. In chapter two, I give an overview of my methods and apply the theoretical framework from chapter one to ethnographic research. I argue that ethnography, like prepping, is characterized by considerable uncertainty, and that ethnographers appear to respond to uncertainty using the same process. In chapter three, I ask what forces shape preppers’ assessments of the risks. I argue that while preppers’ fears are often valid, both their perceptions of and their responses to risks are shaped by moral and cultural, as opposed to merely instrumental, scripts. In chapter four, I examine how preppers’ economic actions are guided by the ways in which they imagine future disasters, and by the values they assign to money. This suggests that even risk-mitigating economic action is still embedded in culture. In chapter five, I explore the discursive strategies preppers use to legitimate their expert claims about the future. I show that both the rationalist and realist discourses in which preppers ground their claims, hinge on performances of masculinity. This suggests that not only culture, but also social structure, shape actions through uncertainty.

Preppers direct our attention to the way uncertainty complicates both individual rational action and historical rationalization. By all accounts, risk-mitigating action should be rational. Yet by taking seemingly rational action to extremes, preppers help to expose rationality’s underlying contractedness. My analysis suggests that social representations and imaginaries are a crucial area in which this social construction takes place, as situated historical actors project their own backgrounds, social locations, and culture into the future. By highlighting the social and cultural forces constructing rational action, this dissertation calls into question rationality’s objective (as opposed to merely normative or discursive) basis.

In this study, I investigate the landscape of video game play in terms of gender’s influence on experiences and preferences; relationship to a gaming identity and community; and understandings of success, skill, and leadership within gaming. I use qualitative methods, including interviews with 54 respondents, online observations of forum posts, and content analysis of older forum posts to assess player’s experiences and perceptions. There were three major possibilities for gender’s influence at the beginning of this project. First, due to an

increasing number of female players, there may be equal opportunities, definitions, and understandings among players. Second, gaming spaces could reflect what is seen in other masculine areas, with women being pushed out and seen as not belonging. Finally, players may express support for equality, but continue to leave women at a disadvantage through cultural ideas within the space. Ultimately, it appears that these possibilities all exist in an uneven distribution across gaming culture. In terms of player experiences and preferences, there is a decreasing difference based on gender, with male and female players starting at similar times and enjoying the same aspects of similar games. When considering identity and community, players share a discomfort with a “gamer” label and have a desire not to associate with it. Finally, the starkest differences and examples of the aforementioned possibilities come with player definitions of success, skill, and leadership. When considering success, players describe an openended, nongendered idea of what this means, allowing – for more casual and hobby-based play – the perception of an even playing field for men and women. On the other hand, when asked about or discussing skill, players defaulted to more masculine definitions and ideas, emphasizing men in their lives as examples of exemplary players and placing women at a disadvantage when it comes to more professional or competitive play. Beyond these aspects of gaming, players continued to create a complex idea about who is equipped for what by defining leadership in more feminine ways, but simultaneously considering this a low-prestige position and further presenting obstacles for women in gaming.

This dissertation examines how schools exacerbate inequality in the digital era. Existing educational research argues that one reason social stratification persists is that privileged children develop valued cultural competencies as a result of class-based differences in parenting. However, we are at a point in history when children, regardless of social origin, develop competencies with digital technologies through online play with peers. Does this mean less privileged children are no longer disadvantaged in their use of digital technology at school?

I use comparative ethnographic data collected in three middle schools to show how teachers treat students’ online play. Contrary to Bourdieuian perspectives of social reproduction that emphasize the role of parenting in providing students vital resources for educational success, I document the role played by teachers in determining whether kids’ digital play is an educational asset or not.

This disciplinary process occurred through teachers’ messages to children about the value of the skills they developed in play online with peers. I find that at a school for mostly wealthy and White children, teachers actively encouraged, if not required, students to communicate online, use social media, and share video game creations as a part of school success. At a school for mostly middle-class and Asian-American children, teachers reprimanded and sanctioned students for the exact same types of activities in favor of traditional learning activities like exams. Lastly, at a school for mostly working class and Latino youth, teachers communicated that online play was irrelevant to achievement, instead emphasizing the development of basic digital skills for twenty-first century vocational work. School-level approaches to kids’ digital play differently enabled the use of digital youth culture for educational success.

A likely consequence of this variability in how teachers discipline play is that children were differently prepared for their next steps as students. Only privileged students received training to geek out and mess around with digital tools as part of a learning agenda. Schools provided early training grounds for kids to see learning as either a space to create and share or, instead, simply as only an activity where students were consumers of teachers’ lessons.