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The Indian diaspora is increasingly engaging with the homeland by forming a range of migrant organizations—organizations constituting a growing sector of non-State actors who engage with the host country and the country of origin in a sustained and profound way. Research on migrant organizations tends to focus only transnational migrant organizations in host countries. Indian Migrant Organizations analyses a set of local and transnational organizations formed by Indian migrants, whose activities include mobilizing resources and connections and engaging in numerous development initiatives in India, and studies their engagement particularly in the Indian healthcare and education sectors. In particular, the book discusses how these organizations have evolved, what kind of healthcare and educational projects and activities they are carrying out, and how such collective efforts are affecting development dynamics in India.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with parents both rich and poor, parenting toddlers to teenagers, this book reveals how digital technologies give parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. It argues that, in late modernity, parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and yet increasingly charged with respecting and developing the agency of their child—leaving much to be negotiated. The book charts how parents enact authority and values through digital technologies—as “screen time,” videogames, and social media become ways of both being together and of setting boundaries, with digital technologies introducing valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward hard-to-imagine futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children’s lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere.

Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book reveals how smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered black activists to create their own news outlets, continuing a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. It identifies three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people—slavery, lynching, and police brutality—and the journalism documenting their atrocities, generating a genealogy showing how slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the abolitionist movement; black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and civil rights movements; and smartphones of today powered the anti–police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, the book shows, is formidable and forever evolving. The text is informed by the author’s activism. Personal accounts of her teaching and her own experiences of police brutality are woven into the book to share how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices to speak up from the margins. Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

The comparative study of law and order policies has mostly overlooked partisan politics as a possible explanation of differences between Western nations. Filling this gap in the literature, this book argues theoretically and substantiates empirically that law and order policies are heavily affected by partisan politics. By means of a large-N analysis of spending data and a new dataset on law and order legislation as well as four in-depth case studies, the empirical evidence shows that party competition and the party ideology of governments do affect policies—depending on the institutional context of a political system. Moreover, path dependencies tend to freeze these effects over a certain period of time creating positive feedback dynamics.

Data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected and posted by police, courts, and prisons; reposted on social media, online news, and mugshot galleries; and bought and sold by data brokers as an increasingly valuable data commodity. The result is “digital punishment,” where mere suspicion or a brush with the law can have lasting consequences. This analysis describes the transformation of criminal records into millions of data points; the commodification of these data into a valuable digital resource; and the impact of this shift on people, society, and public policy. The consequences of digital punishment, as described in hundreds of interviews detailed in this book, lead people to purposefully opt out of society as they cope with privacy and due process violations.

This book, Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life, is concerned with the home, but it is not bounded by the home. While the home provides a necessary anchor point for our empirical and theoretical work, we are well aware that the home is not self-contained but is a node in multiple commercial, cultural, and technical networks, all of which interact, and all of which have local implications and global reach. The home’s socio-technical ecology operates in recursive relations with these much larger ecologies, none of which can be ignored if the home is to be understood. This book unearths this digital domesticity through accounts of evolving socio-technical relations as they unfold in processes of adopting and adapting to innovations; using, maintaining, and neglecting the complex of technologies in the home; and confronting the obsolescence of particular technologies and failure of systems of consumer technologies.

Framed in debates about the crisis of democracy, the book analyzes one of the most influential social movements of recent times: Spain’s “Indignados” or “15-M” movement. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world. Based on access to key participants in the 15-M movement and Podemos, and extensive participant observation, the book tells the story of this remarkable movement, its emergence, evolution, and impact. In so doing, it challenges some of the core arguments in social movement scholarship about the factors likely to lead to movement success. Instead, the book argues that movements organized around autonomous network logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal organizations, strong professionalized leadership, and the ability to attract external resources. The key to understanding its power lies in the shared political culture and collective identity that emerged following the occupation of Spain’s central squares. These protest camps sustained the movement by forging reciprocal ties of solidarity between diverse actors, and generating a shared set of critical master frames across a diverse set of actors and issues (e.g., housing, education, pensions, privatization of public services, corruption) that enabled the movement to effectively contest hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and democracy, influencing public debate and the political agenda.

This volume focuses on the debate that developed in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom after the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, in January 2015. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the unfolding of the public debate in terms of content of claims making, framing, and justifications as well as the quality (deliberativeness) of the discourses by a variety of actors in the public sphere. The volume features a threefold comparison that considers how the debate differs across countries; how it evolved over time; and how it varies when one looks at mainstream media compared to social movement arenas. Based on a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the volume pays particular attention to radical left, radical right, and religious actors and to issues related to migration and integration, secularism and cultural diversity, security and civil rights. Taking its starting point from the infamous attacks of January 2015, this volume aims also at contributing to a theoretical innovation by reflecting on the ways in which transformative events trigger discursive critical junctures.

One in two white youth born into the upper-middle class will fall from it. Drawing upon 10 years of longitudinal interviews with over 100 American youth, this book shows which upper-middle-class youth are most likely to fall, how they fall, and why they do not see it coming. The book shows that upper-middle-class youth inherit different amounts of academic knowledge, institutional insights, and money from their parents. Those raised with more of these resources enter class reproduction pathways, while those raised with fewer of these resources enter downwardly mobile paths. Of course, upper-middle-class youth whose families give them few resources could switch courses by acquiring these resources from their community. They rarely do. Instead, they internalize identities that reflect their resource weaknesses and encourage them to maintain them. Those who fall are then youth raised with resource weaknesses, and they fall by internalizing identities that discourage them from gaining more resources. They are often surprised by their downward mobility as they observed other time periods in which their resources and identities kept them or their parents in their social class.

The Innovation Complex shows how the new urban economy is being shaped by digital technology businesses and organizations, city government, and a tech-financial meritocracy. Looking closely at “innovation” in New York from the city’s fall in the dot-com crash of 2000 to its emergence as the second-largest startup ecosystem of the 2010s, the book examines the emergence of new organizational, geographical, and discursive spaces that literally root digital production in place, molding a tech-competent workforce, public-private-nonprofit partnerships, and a hegemonic, entrepreneurial culture. The Innovation Complex begins by exploring the city’s subculture of hackathons and meetups, describes the careers of New York–based startup founders and venture capitalists, and traces the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to “innovation coastline.” Analyzing connections between local networks and global capital, it shows how a Silicon Valley model of innovation is urbanized by big cities like New York, where an influential alliance between business, government, and university leaders recalls C. Wright Mills’s potent concept of the power elite. Paradoxically, while the 21st-century economy makes cities more successful, they also become less livable for those who cannot reap tech’s rewards.