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Like language, the law is an instrument – a tool – for the accomplishment of certain purposes. The idealized understanding insisted that the law is, if not divinely inspired, the empirical manifestation of received wisdom and truth. On this view the law is crafted to produce ideal outcomes. Richard Posner once insisted that the law was purposefully crafted to achieve economic efficiency (1973).¹ Warren Samuels reminded us that the law is an instrument to get one's way. The interesting question, therefore, concerns who is able to control this valuable instrument? Sometimes good and noble people wield the tool. At other times nefarious forces prevail. Samuels presented his vision of the law by means of a Virginia statute concerning an obscure pest known as Cedar Rust (Samuels, 1971). As it happens, Virginia apple growers were able to wield the tool – saws and axes – against red cedar trees which serve as an intermediate host for a fungus detrimental to apple trees. Small spores make for large debates.

Existing research argues that repression hindered the ability of local civil rights movements to influence the development of local War on Poverty programs; however, the Virginia civil rights struggle defies this pattern. This comparative county-level study melds institutionalist accounts of welfare state development with an analysis of movement repression in order to explain this paradox. A distinction is made between situational and institutional repression. While scholars focus on the former and its negative impact on mobilization, this study suggests that institutional repression can have the opposite effect, unifying movements and facilitating their influence on the formation and implementation of poverty policy.

This study examines liberal second-wave feminists’ writings about cooking. Most scholarship of liberal feminism has focused on the attempts to integrate women into previously male-dominated public spaces such as higher education, the professions, and political office. Less attention has been paid to how these feminists politicized feminized spaces such as the home. A longstanding tension between the housewife role and feminist identities has led many to theorize that feminists avoid or resent domestic tasks. However, I argue that some liberal feminists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s suggested engaging with cooking in subversive ways that challenged patriarchal institutions and supported their political goals.

I analyze 148 articles about cooking in Ms. magazine between 1972 and 1985. I also analyze the copy and recipes within four community cookbooks published by liberal feminist organizations.

I find that liberal feminists suggested utilizing time- and labor-saving cooking methods, encouraged men to cook, and proposed that women make money from cooking. These three techniques challenged the traditional division of domestic labor, supported women’s involvement in the paid workplace, and increased women’s control of economic resources.

This study turns the opposition between feminism and feminized tasks on its head, showing that rather than avoiding cooking, some liberal feminists proposed ways of cooking that challenged patriarchal institutions. I show how subordinate populations can develop ways of subversively engaging with tasks that are typically seen as oppressive, using them in an attempt to advance their social position.

Purpose – This chapter analyses social networks and discourses in relation to YouTube videos and user comments relating to the traumatic event of a school shooting.

Methodology/approach – First, general patterns in the YouTube responses are mapped. What was the overall structure of the flow of videos posted in response to a shooting? Second, social network aspects are discussed. Which systems of interrelated (re)actions emerge through the videos? Finally, a set of three videos representing key texts in the analysed discursive formation are further analysed as regards the written discourse of their comment threads.

Findings – Participants were organised in the form of relatively autonomous and isolated islands of meaning making, but one could still identify a core public engaging in the creation, maintenance and negotiation of the branching and relatively open-ended narratives that recount and try to make sense of what happened and why.

Implications – The main result is that, also in relation to largely dramatic and tragic events such as a school shooting, there are patterns to support the idea of an emerging new media landscape where audiences play an increasingly active role as co-producers of content and interpretations.

Originality of paper – The paper deals with comments as well as video content, and on analysing them from the joint perspectives of social network analysis and discursive network analysis. This means that results give knowledge about two things; how the YouTube audience(s) to videos about the Virginia Tech shooting is/are organised, and what topics are discussed in relation to the videos.

This ethnographic case study examined college pathways of rural, first-generation students. Current research primarily examines factors predicting rural students’ college aspirations, participation, and completion. This study examined why and how such factors influenced students in a rural, high-poverty county and explored how rural culture influenced pathways. The study found that attachment to family significantly influenced college-going decisions and behaviors. Families provided support necessary for high aspirations, college-going, and persistence. Students’ decision to leave, return, or stay was difficult given this attachment; yet, lack of economic opportunity affected decisions also. Cultural legacies influenced college-going. Schools, communities, and peers were also relevant. Given the importance of family, institutional, state, and federal policies and practices must involve families and replicate family support models.

A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.