Culture and Social Analysis Workshop presentations by:

Leah Gose, Looking Beyond Location: How Organizations Shape the (In)Accessibility of Social Safety Net Services
Social services organizations shape the accessibility of their services. Whether or not people are able to qualify for, physically access, or obtain consequential value from such services is determined by the various choices and operational practices of an organization. While scholars often look to the geospatial mismatch between where organizations and people in need are, this conceptualization of access depends on assumptions about what services are offered and how. In this chapter of my dissertation, I offer up a multi-dimensional framework of accessibility for services offered in organizational contexts. Using data on food provision services in metropolitan Atlanta, I find that organizations shape barriers to access in how potential beneficiaries may (1) qualify to receive services, (2) use or enter into service spaces, and (3) experience positive and negative impact from their engagement. These dimensions build on one another in the context of how individuals may engage with social service organizations, particularly in the process of service provision. I find that variable conceptualizations of effectiveness and the stated purposes of such organizations shape many aspects of their operations that, as an end result, determine impact for beneficiaries (e.g., service area coverage, visitation limits). I pair findings from my overall research with mapped data on 32 food pantries operating in a segment of eastern metropolitan Atlanta with 2020 ACS estimates to highlight how variable operational practices can shape broader accessibility across communities, not just between organizations.

Catharina O’Donnell, How Progressive and Conservative Organizations Mobilize their Members
American social movements are increasingly national, institutionalized, and formalized (Meyer and Tarrow 1998; Minkoff 2004; Gorringe 2017). Rather than engage in spontaneous, grassroots protest activity at the individual level, Americans are now more likely to affiliate with a political organization that advocates on their behalf. But do these social movement organizations still attempt to convert movement support into concrete individual action – a core task for social movements (Oegema and Klandermans 1994) – or do they largely update members on organizational activities and solicit donations to fund these activities? I examine this question through a computational text analysis of 12,769 emails sent by 30 mainstream American social movement organizations to their member mailing lists from March 2018 to June 2022. I find that organizations issue pervasive calls to individual action among their members. Moreover, I find that the kinds of actions solicited from members are systematically different across ideological lines. Progressive social movement organizations ask readers to complete short term, urgent tasks that target outside political actors, such as calling representatives. On the other hand, conservative organizations ask members to engage in action that enhances their ideological understanding and attachment to the organization, such as listening to a new podcast the organization produced. I argue that these differences have important implications for the long-term trajectories of the movements, with conservative movements more effectively building collective identity than progressive movements. 

Derek Robey, “Being on the Right Side of History” – Schema of Racism and Race Among White Residents of the US and Canada
I use 93 in-depth interviews with white residents of four cities in the United States and Canada to assess how they frame their nation’s history, understand their moral obligations with regard multiculturalism in the present, and project themselves into more diverse futures. I identify and describe two cultural schema that are widely available and employed in the two nations: (1) Projective multiculturalism frames the nation as having a long way to go before racial equality is achieved and asserts that people have a collective responsibility for addressing systemic racism. (2) Nostalgic colorblindness frames racial equality as a victory of the nation’s history and asserts that any focus on race is inherently divisive. I find that the likelihood of a white person employing one schema as opposed to the other is shaped by how they imagine their personal trajectory to be connected to or disconnected from the imagined collective trajectory of white people as a group. Those who employ the projective multiculturalism schema deviate from the expectations of group position threat theory in that they are endorsing positions that would ostensibly lead to declining status for a group to which they belong. I argue this requires a reconceptualization of how groupness and status are intertwined in social processes.

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