Browsing by Subject "Activism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Game On, Washington! Examining American Sport’s Response to the Uvalde Massacre
    (Midwest Public Affairs Conference, 2022) Thomas, M. Blair; Daniel, Jamie Levine; School of Public and Environmental Affairs
    On May 24, 2022, a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In the aftermath, stakeholders within and across sports came together to call for political action around gun control. These included individual athletes (e.g., Natasha Cloud of the Washington Mystics and DeMarcus Lawrence of the Dallas Cowboys), as well as coaches (e.g., Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs and Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors). In addition, the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees coordinated their Twitter feeds to focus on gun violence statistics during a game, and the Miami Heat’s public address announcer, on behalf of the team, encouraged fans to call their state senators. In this essay, we examine the factors contributing to this coalescence. We build on relevant public administration scholarship that has examined the roles of athletes as social constructors and their impact on the administrative state. We contextualize this scholarship alongside the widespread public support for some measure of gun control. We also discuss future research avenues to examine the ongoing impacts of athlete protests.
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    Howard Zinn and the Struggle for the Microphone: History, Objectivity, and Citizenship
    (2009) Kelly, Jason M.
    Every year, historians in the United States attend the American Historical Association (AHA), a conference that has met annually since 1884. The AHA draws scholars from all specializations, and it is the primary organization through which the profession is represented. In 1969, the conference met at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. At the business meeting on the evening of 28 December, the radicals sought to take control of the organization. The minutes demonstrate the dangers of trusting narratives--even (or especially) those proffered as neutral accounts. They do not document the moment entirely, nor do they capture the participants' experiences of it. On the central event, the records are silent. What actually happened speaks to the issues of power, neutrality, and knowledge that were central themes in Howard Zinn's career. In those moments, Zinn, representing the Radical Historians' Caucus, sought to present a resolution to the members of the AHA. He grabbed a microphone and attempted to introduce it before the meeting's close. It denounced the twin evils of "the physical and cultural destruction of the Vietnamese people" and the "Black community at home". Before he had a chance to speak, John K. Fairbank intervened by wrestling the microphone out of Zinn's hands. The episode became known as the "Struggle for the Mike". In this article, the author talks about this episode and focuses on history of the profession, notions of objectivity, and citizenship.
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