Citizens,consumers, workers,and activists: civil society during and after water privatization struggles

Water privatization battles and their aftermath in seven Latin American, African, and Asian countries feature diverse and often complementary forms of action by unions, popular movements, neighbourhood associations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs cooperate with popular movements for water rights more than the literature would suggest, and after mobilizations against privatization, activists have had some success maintaining pressure for better service to poor neighbourhoods through advocacy and local self-provision arrangements. Public employees’ unions play important roles in water policy coalitions, often practising a distinctive form of social movement unionism. These experiences argue for a more flexible understanding of categories and organizational forms in civil society.     

How is Anxiety Involved in the Longitudinal Relationship between Brooding Rumination and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents?

A growing body of research supports the application of Response Styles Theory to adolescent populations. Although the essential dynamic, namely that rumination increases the incidence of depressive symptoms, has been demonstrated among adolescents, a number of important empirical questions remain, such as: what are the gender differences and developmental trends for brooding and reflective rumination?; does a reciprocal relationship exist between brooding or reflective rumination, on the one hand, and depressive symptoms and anxiety, on the other hand, over time? and how do additional variables (i.e., anxiety) impact upon the rumination-depressive symptoms relationship? In this study, self-reported levels of rumination (both brooding and reflective), and anxious and depressive symptoms were measured longitudinally across 4 months in a sample of 976 community adolescents (46 % females), aged 11–16 years old. Mean group differences showed that female adolescents reported engaging in more brooding rumination than male adolescents beginning at 13 years of age. A reciprocal brooding rumination to depressive symptoms relationship and a reciprocal brooding rumination to anxiety relationship were found over time, and they did not differ for boys and girls. We tested the possibility that anxious symptoms would function as a third variable, but the obtained model showed that brooding rumination and anxiety both contributed unique variance in predicting changes in depressive symptoms over time.     

Love,literacy, and laments: themes of women writers in late imperial China

In late imperial China (roughly the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century), the expanding literacy of women helped to popularize ideals of romantic love, and to raise women's expectations regarding marriage and their active participation in creative cultural activities. As a result, literate women easily experienced hopes and aspirations that conflicted directly with the demands of the patriarchal family system. As seen through a sampling of courtesan and gentry women's writings, some women responded to these conflicts by questioning the value of literacy itself, some expressed despair over their fate, while others began to raise questions regarding their society's constraints on women.     

Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a theory of interracial labor politics, in which union membership reduces racial resentment. Cross‐sectional analyses consistently show that white union members have lower racial resentment and greater support for policies that benefit African Americans. More importantly, our panel analysis suggests that gaining union membership between 2010 and 2016 reduced racial resentment among white workers. The findings highlight the important role of labor unions in mass politics and, more broadly, the importance of organizational membership for political attitudes and behavior.