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This paper examines the identity talk of 30 activists from Hartford, Connecticut who work in the overlapping areas of labor, women's rights, queer organizing, anti-racism, community organizing, anti-globalization, and peace. Rather than seeing this talk as strictly a function of the collective action context, this identity talk is analyzed in terms of the multiple social influences that produce it. According to this model, activist identity can be shaped by ideologies derived from social movement culture, biographical experiences with racial, class, gender, and sexuality-based marginalization, and the cultural resources from both pre-existing and movement-based organizations. The analysis of open-ended interviews with activists reveals three somewhat distinct kinds of identity talk: ideological talk derived from either the 1960s white Left or from black nationalist traditions; biographical talk that highlights either a single dimension or multiple dimensions of marginality; organizational talk that references the mission, constituency, or organizing philosophy of the social movement organization of the activist as her/his impetus for activism. I also find that these differences in identity talk are associated with different patterns of social movement participation. This analysis challenges social movement scholars to study identity talk as a creative cultural accomplishment.

Ich habe genug (I have enough) BWV 82 is one of the best known, most regularly performed and consistently recorded of J.S. Bach's approximately 200 extant sacred cantatas. ¹ In the text, by an anonymous author, the narrator repeatedly expresses their readiness to die, in faith that they will be received by their saviour in eternal life. The whole cantata expresses a fearless ‘longing for death’ (Schweitzer, 1911/1966, p. 114), coupled with a serene contentment. Bach's setting of this text for religious purposes not only supports the sentiments expressed by the narrator but colours, illuminates, vitalises and elevates it in ways that startle the ear, quicken the spirit and stir the imagination. In the third and final aria of the cantata, Bach employs an almost-jaunty dance rhythm to accompany the narrator's anticipatory delight in their own death, liberated from worldly and bodily suffering. After identifying some of the ingenious ways Bach animates the text, I offer some speculations and elaborations as to how and why this work has had such an enduring presence in the Western musical canon, for believers and non-believers alike.

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

In this chapter, we reflect on the possibilities of craftivism — yarn bombing, specifically — in a fourth-year undergraduate seminar on feminist praxis. We suggest that knitting in the classroom, as an ‘everyday [act] of defiance’ (Baumgardner & Richards, 2000, p. 283), opens a productive space for complex and challenging conversations, in the process enabling not only different ways of listening, but also different ways of learning. Knitting, as a meditative and embodied practice, encourages and supports critical attentiveness. We also argue that craftivism can operate to make change in a way that emphasizes collaboration, non-violence and critical self-reflection. Social change, in a craftivist framework, happens in the everyday, and perhaps more radically, within the domestic spaces of the normatively feminine. Finally, our project demonstrated that knitting as feminist praxis serves a bridging function: we contend that systems of power may be challenged through knitting-as-protest, and that students may be able to practice engaged citizenship as they navigate the slippery borders between public and private, and academic and community-based feminisms.

Despite being the standard against which all other offshore work sites are compared, the male-dominated work culture of the Gulf of Mexico has received little attention from social scientists. Drawing on the literature on women and work in the United States, on women in the U.S. South, in the military, and in the oil field, and on interviews with hundreds of individuals this paper explores the roles of women in the development and maintenance of the offshore oil and gas industry in southern Louisiana.

A motif, as defined by Jean-Charles Seigneuret (1988, p. 17), is an ‘essential part of a contemporary academic discipline known as thematology or thematics’ and that ‘two factors may explain the rise of the thematological method: its interpretive potentialities and its intrinsic congruency with the history of ideas’.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first introduced the story of Snow White and her evil stepmother the Queen in 1812. Decades later, the character of the Queen, who later becomes the Evil Queen, is depicted in copious narratives and several different mediums. A central parallel in most of the representations of this character is that she is presented as evil. As such, how the Evil Queen character is represented in media sees a congruence of specific aesthetical characteristics, which combines to symbolize a rhetorical motif for evil.