When young people talk about climate change, they often express a sense of generational abandonment - that people who came before them made this mess, but it is up to them to face the consequences and clean it up. This is understandable as climate change is a clear case of intergenerational injustice (as well as racial, gender, class, global, and species injustice). However, it is not the whole story, and it is generally a very disempowering starting point for making change. Throughout time, many people have resisted the forces that are causing the climate crisis, and even more have cultivated strategies of resilience in profoundly difficult life circumstances. Younger generations can look to their ancestors for lessons on resistance and resilience, as well as to currently-living elders in their own families and communities.

This project cultivates those intergenerational connections with the express purpose of resourcing young people to collectively survive the climate crisis, by creating a new student-led oral history collection at the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Mardigian Library. As part of a new class titled “Weeds, Seeds, and Earthly Needs: Collectively Surviving the Climate Crisis,” which was first taught in Summer 2025, students interview an elder in their own family or community to gain wisdom in navigating an uncertain future amidst climate change. Nine students from very diverse backgrounds participated in the first iteration of this course, and 4 narrators chose to share their stories publicly in the collection. The oral histories that students collected as a part of this process told rich stories of resistance and resilience - from escaping occupation and civil war with heritage seeds to maintaining an alpaca farm in the face of suburban encroachment. In summer 2026, I am working with a student who was part of the inaugural cohort to build out the oral history archive at the campus library to ensure that the oral histories that students are collecting from their own elders through this class have an enduring place to call home. In doing so, we are building a publicly available resource that all young people can access to see that they are not alone. Rather, they are standing on the shoulders of ancestors who have survived so much and living the now famous quote from Dinos Christianopoulos, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Dr. Florence Emily Castillo

Angela Andrade

In October 2025, three Chicana/Mexicana organizers in Dallas created a respite center to help immigrant families navigate the changes to a once routine immigration check-in process. With the Trump administration's removal of Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans seeking asylum, communities saw a massive upswing in the detainment of immigrants who were following the steps to migrate "the right way". What began with Venezuelans quickly grew to include migrants from all over Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East - almost all engaged in asylum cases. Supported by Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, our group began showing up outside of the Dallas ICE offices daily to prepare folks in case of detention and offered support to family members navigating the complex DHS systems to locate and support their detained loved ones. Many organizing decisions were made daily in real-time as we found ourselves in a continuous state of pivoting and recalibration with each new executive order deployed by Trump's regime. However, because this grassroots work began as triage support and continues to operate in a constant state of adaptation, organizers have struggled to move beyond survival to build a sustainable movement infrastructure based in liberatory praxis and collective healing.

When grassroots work is urgent, organizers fall into the trap of "putting out fires" without dedicating time to build intentional practices and infrastructures rooted in liberation and community care as resistance. This paper utilizes autoethnography, personal testimonio, and plática as methods to unpack the consequences of continuing to operate in what we call a "triage space of survival". These methodologies also allow us to engage in shared healing from the trauma we personally experienced while also making sense of and theorizing about the mechanisms that lead to these outcomes in the first place. Through an analysis of this grassroots work, we formulate a call to action that must center Black liberation frameworks and decolonized relationality if this work is to become sustainable and minimize the impacts of trauma central to organizing work. As grassroots organizing increases under our current state of authoritative rule, we also hope that our work can serve as a model or a conversation starter for other community organizers engaging in necessary- but nevertheless traumatic- work.

Understanding children’s experiences of war-induced conflict matters to any adult responsible for children’s ongoing psychological and emotional care. The proposed project brings systematic and empirical document analysis methods to a recent archive of children’s drawings collected from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, created as children lived through the ongoing conflict in Gaza following October 7, 2023. As one of the only contemporaneous visual records created directly by children living through this period, these drawings provide immediate insight into how young people perceive and represent the conflict. Grounded in sociological approaches that view children as social actors while recognizing that childhood is unevenly distributed and often disrupted under conditions of violence, the study treats these drawings as important forms of knowledge produced within a specific historical and political context. Using visual methods, this project contributes empirical insight into a contemporary conflict from children’s perspectives, with their art capturing emotional and psychological perceptions that might otherwise be overlooked using other methods, or inaccessible due to the precarious conditions of military conflict. The project advances important clinical, political, methodological, and theoretical considerations for childcare labor, childhood studies and children as research subjects, and while it explores the unique considerations necessary when attempting to study children’s perceptions, point-in-time emotional experiences witnessing and living through war-based conflict, and the intersection of the two, the primary goal of this project is to center children’s perceptions as valuable knowledge, and to center those perceptions in decisions made by adults who are responsible for their care.

Following the events of October 7, 2023, The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) attempted to support children living in Gaza at this time through art therapy. Adult clinical volunteers hosted drawing sessions in refugee tents, resulting in a dataset of 16 drawings (that survived the disruption of access to the archive of remainder of the drawings following a bombing on September 25, 2025, and armed takeover of the facility on October 13, 2025). The remaining drawings may still be recovered following the return of internet access to the servers in the region. These drawings provide moment-in-time insights into the direct experiences of children during witnessing and living through this conflict, where they have been impacted by this particular conflict at historical levels with more children killed in Gaza in the initial months of the conflict (when these drawings were collected) than in the last six years, globally (UNICEF, 2025).

Drawings can capture what words cannot capture, for young children who do not have an adult level capacity for language or otherwise, and are a communicative tool for young people without adult command of abstract linguistic expression (Kitahar & Matsuishi, 2001) as well as a tool for adults experiencing trauma (Harber, 2011). Analysis of children’s drawings (though very limited) during wartime in other historical contexts have provided insight into how children experience and perceive war conflict and how that conflict impacts their lives (McLernon & Cairns, 2001). The current study contributes to an already limited, but important, literature analyzing wartime children’s drawings, for an ongoing conflict for which there has not yet been such an analysis. This archive of children’s drawings provides almost real time insight into the current landscape in which the children who drew these pictures are growing up, and the historically specific conditions which contribute to the social construction of the childhood they experience in this specific context. As such, this project proposes to analyze this dataset to understand the question: How do children visually represent their experiences of conflict in drawings collected from the GCMHP between 2024-2025?

Mental health is an important concern among adolescents, and at school, discussions about it occur both informally and as part of the official curriculum. In this paper, I show how students at a large public high school perceived the school’s role in promoting or threatening their mental health. I also consider how adults at the school engaged with mental health as a feature of the official curriculum. I draw on three years of ethnographic observations (2019-2022) at a site I call Hamilton High School, as well as 108 interviews with Hamilton students and faculty/staff. I find that adults in the school did little to support students’ mental health, framing the topic when part of the official curriculum as an unpleasant or undesirable subject. At times, adults’ behaviors actively undermined students’ efforts to support their own and their peers’ mental health. I present vignettes from two teachers and four students to demonstrate how mental health was discussed and how students perceived adults’ responses to their struggles. These findings highlight how mental health is understood and impacted in the context of a large public high school. Overall, this work contributes to literature about schools’ influence on adolescents’ mental health, barriers to effective student-teacher relationships, and schools’ relational cultures.

The US territories—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guåhan, and American Sāmoa—remain permanently subordinated under US rule. Governed through legal frameworks of unincorporation, these places are denied full sovereignty while granted limited mobility and partial political recognition. Territorial migrants occupy distinct social, political, and legal positions that often set their experiences apart from their larger panethnic migrant communities, yet their experiences remain underexamined in US sociology. This article draws on interviews with Sāmoans, Puerto Ricans, and Virgin Islanders to examine how colonial legacies shape citizen-subject belonging and everyday life. I explore how participants navigate structural neglect, legal ambiguity, and cultural displacement, and how they cultivate practices of care, refusal, and political engagement in response. Together, their accounts illuminate how people living at the periphery imagine and enact alternative futures both beyond and within the nation-state.

Constance Manga Ndeleko

The proliferation of gender-based violence, particularly femicide (deliberate killing of women), has emerged as a critical social issue worldwide, with an estimated 50,000 women killed by their intimate partners or family members (UN Women 2025), and, on average, 137 women were killed every day in 2024 by someone in their own family. Africa recorded the highest toll, accounting for at least 22,600 victims in 2024 (Femicides-in-2024-Global-Estimates-of-Intimate-Partner-Family-Member-Femicides-En, n.d.). Africa Data Hub (2024) reported in “Silencing Women” that Kenya’s femicide rate reached a record high of at least 170 women killed in 2024, marking a 79% increase from the 95 cases documented in 2023. The Nairobi Women’s Hospital’s Gender Recovery Center indicated that approximately 4,000 cases of gender-based violence (GBV) were reported monthly in Kenya (Nation, 2024). These numbers highlight the severity of the ongoing crisis of violence against women and girls, with young women aged 18 to 35 years being the most affected (Civicus Monitor, 2024). These statistics reveal recurring patterns of deep-rooted structural inequalities and the urgent need to address gender violence. According to Hooks (1984), “male violence against women in the family is an expression of male domination” (p. 118). Feminist activists frame femicide as an epidemic of gender-based violence, a national crisis that has prompted a wave of digital activism since 2019 (Feminist in Kenya, 2025). “Femicide is the most brutal and extreme manifestation of violence” (UN Women, 2023).

In this wave of activism, Kenyan women are leveraging the affordances of social media platforms, particularly Twitter (now X) and Facebook, to challenge institutional silence, memorialize victims, and mobilize collective action against systemic violence (UN WOMEN, 2024). Such digital movements encourage media attention and systemic changes against femicide, facilitating women in turning individual trauma into collective political action by sparking national and international conversations through #HashtagActivism (Jackson et al., 2020; Gundersen and Zaleski, 2020; Busra Yalcinoz-Ucan and Hande Eslen-Ziya, 2023).

The expansion of digital media platforms and the 40.8 percent internet penetration in Kenya have driven the emergence of hashtag campaigns, online protests, and coordinated digital mobilizations (Statista, 2024). Social media motivates women to share their experiences of violence, grieve together, and rethink the pursuit of justice and policy reform (Micciolo, 2021). However, these campaigns could not succeed without the collective efforts of activists and individuals who protested femicide by expressing their pain, anger, and frustration to a broader audience (Murphy and Sammut Scerri, 2025). As technology advances, femicide cases are no longer solely dependent on editors or journalists to assess their newsworthiness; instead, images, testimonies, and calls to action spread swiftly from “digital paparazzi,” friends, family members, and activist networks to millions almost instantly (Gatwiri et al., 2023). While traditional media continues to influence audience reach and policy outcomes, scholars have overlooked how both conventional and digital media ecosystems interact, compete, and reinforce each other—especially as personal trauma becomes a collective form of political expression.

The difference between traditional and social media in this context extends beyond the technical; it is political. Traditional media depends on editorial gatekeeping (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009), scheduled publishing, journalism standards, and often proximity to government or corporate influence, which all shape content and who sees it (Shoemaker & Reese, 1991). These traits could give credibility to femicide stories and may impact policies and offline audiences. Social media, on the other hand, may allow decentralized creation, algorithmic sharing, and direct relationships between creators and viewers, helping marginalized voices to bypass institutional gatekeepers (West, 2017). Studies show that “network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing collective action efforts” (West, 2017, p.29), and they are likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. For example, through selective salience (Entman, 1993), feminist activists may target the audience with key messages to harness attention on social media platforms and navigate content moderation.

Studies show that femicide cases remain largely invisible because they are an uncomfortable topic, often misunderstood or dismissed, or hard to research due to limited data and methodological challenges (Weil, 2016). Therefore, this research examines how salience is used by women through social media platforms in discussions about femicide. It examines how Kenyan anti-femicide activists use social media to discuss femicide issues analyze how the themes, framing strategies, and engagement patterns within these discussions shape public understanding and feminist digital activism.

Digital activism represents a new paradigm that enhances the visibility of socio-political issues, online communities, and the dissemination of messages to a wider audience across borders (Sarrats, 2022). Despite the digital divide and cyberbullying, digital activism provides space and platforms for feminist activism that aims to empower marginalized voices who have encountered GBV, particularly femicide. In Kenya, social media platforms remain essential in driving the agenda against gender-based violence, including femicide. Facebook and Twitter (X) hashtag activism analysis has been key in mobilizing feminist counterpublics that challenge patriarchal violence (Okech, 2021). These digital movements create a community of solidarity where women share lived experiences, anger, frustrations, document abuse, and collectively demand justice. Social media platforms have become a powerful force that encourages women to organize protests and turn individual trauma into collective political action that demands justice and policy change (Okech, 2021; Arslanoglu, 2025).

In 2024, the murder of Rita Waeni and Starlet Wahu exemplified the power of social media, spurring mass action protests across the country. Women leveraged the hashtag campaign (including #EndFemicideKE, #StopKillingUs, and #TotalShutDownKE) to organize a nationwide protest that attracted approximately 20,000 participants offline (Civicus, 2024). This was the largest protest against gender-based violence in Kenya’s history (Brechenmacher & Nyakora, 2024; Habib, 2024). Previous studies show that digital campaigns extend beyond awareness initiatives to lobbying for policy reforms, legal recognition of femicide as a crime, creating data, and breaking the silence on femicide (Cayli Messina, 2022). Kenya’s anti-femicide digital activism represents the broader global pattern of feminist online movements. Comparative studies demonstrate parallels between Kenya’s anti-femicide movement and the #NiUnaMenos movement that originated in Argentina in 2015 (Bedrosian, 2022), thereby demonstrating how hashtag activism can evolve into a powerful social movement that challenges victim-blaming narratives, demands policy reform, and turns individual trauma into collective action (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2024). Kenyan activists are both learning from and contributing to the larger global discourse on feminist resistance while adapting strategies to their local context.

This notwithstanding, social media remains an untapped source of information to catalyze policy action and social change (Yeung, 2018). Considering the diversity of social media platforms, the incidence of femicide in Kenya, and the role of digital platforms, this research offers insights for: R1.) How do Kenyan women’s discussions of femicide on social media change over time? R2.) How do key themes/frames shift across different social media platforms over time? R3.) Which themes/frames generate the highest public engagement, and what do these patterns reveal about public awareness of (victims/perpetrators), digital feminist activism (collective action), and potential policy influence? As a work in progress, this study will employ quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyze data, specifically about 800 posts on Twitter/X and Facebook, for the presence of key themes and frames over time, particularly during the peak protest months (January, March, June, July, and September 2024).

Scholars have increasingly argued that colonialism has shaped contemporary environmental crises. They contend that colonialism created an extraction-based economy in the colony which persisted into the postcolonial period (Best and Levitt 2009; Wallerstein 1974), propagating resource drain and environmental destruction (Bunker 1990; Hickel et al. 2022). While this literature on the colonial economy captures broad dynamics of the longue-durée, it needs elaboration. First, existing scholarship does not adequately account for economies that do develop or industrialize under colonialism, like Curaçao, Aruba and Trinidad (exceptions include Edwards 2025). Instead, it focuses on colonies as sites of raw material extraction. Second, by operating at a high level of abstraction, it does not adequately examine the meso-level mechanisms by which two major economic actors - state and capital - interact under colonialism to produce an extractive economy. In an effort to capture the broad trends, it overlooks the specific, historical logics at play.

This paper remedies these gaps by examining a case of a colony that industrialized under colonialism – Curaçao – to answer the question, how did the state relate to capital under colonialism? I examine the meso-scale historical logics by which the colonial state treats industrial capital on the Dutch Caribbean island colony. I take water management as my site, as it was a high-stakes issue, given the island's dry climate. This meant that water was a high stakes issue for both the state and the industrializing multinational – Dutch oil multinational corporation Shell. Shell needed water for its refining operation on the island, and the colonial state needed it to provide drinking water and to support limited agriculture. I trace water policy from 1918 to 1948, to understand how the state relates to capital by focusing two major developments: 1) the establishment of desalination towards urban drinking water provision, and 2) the mismanagement of groundwater, that served rural areas and agriculture.

I argue that – bereft of support from the central imperial government – the colonial state in Curaçao was highly financially dependent on Shell, and therefore engaged in covert competition with the corporation in pursuing water policy. In other words, both corporation and colonial state attempted to gain access to as much water as possible, to serve their interests. The colonial state was not able to regulate the multinational on its groundwater abstraction, because it was dependent on Shell. Therefore, it covertly competed for water with the corporation instead. This dynamic drives water policy on the island. While it alone does not explain outcomes like the rise of the first desalination plant or the mismanagement of groundwater, it is a necessary background condition. Covert competition is one form that state-capital relations take under industrial colonialism, at the nexus of environment and development.

This paper brings this environment-development nexus to the center of the political economy of colonialism, and contributes an explication of the historical mechanisms by which it develops. Further, it builds on environmental sociological approaches to state-capital relations in the governance of nature, interrogating how colonialism shapes this process.

Best, Lloyd, and Kari Levitt. 2009. Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press.

Bunker, Stephen G. 1990. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. 1st edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edwards, Zophia. 2025. Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago. Durham London: Duke University Press.

Hickel, Jason, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi. 2022. "Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015." Global Environmental Change 73:102467. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis." Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(4):387–415. doi:10.1017/S0010417500007520.