Rashawn Ray

This article examines the mentoring experiences of 58 underrepresented minority (URM) faculty at 22 research-extensive institutions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus group data, participants discussed the importance of mentoring across the life course, the ideal attributes of mentoring relationships, the challenges to effective mentoring, and the role of political guidance. These data elicited three main themes regarding mentoring: (a) Life course practices geared toward accumulating social capital are critical, (b) major barriers are linked to the undervaluing of faculty research areas and community-engaged scholarly commitments, and (c) connections with mentors who understand the struggles specific to URMs at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) can assist with retention and success. This study provides a roadmap for shifting how we engage with URM faculty and strategies and knowledge to assess the effectiveness of mentoring to increase the retention of URM faculty.

Social media activism presents sociologists with the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how groups form and sustain collective identities around political issues throughout the course of a social movement. This paper contributes to a growing body of sociological literature on social media by applying an intersectional framework to a content analysis of over 400,000 tweets related to #SayHerName. Our findings demonstrate that Twitter users who identified with #SayHerName engage in intersectional mobilization by highlighting Black women victims of police violence and giving attention to intersections with gender identity. #SayHerName is a dialogue that centres Black cisgender and transgender women victims of state-sanctioned violence. Additionally, #SayHerName is a space for highlighting Black women victims of non-police violence. Therefore, we propose that future research on social media activism should incorporate intersectionality as a basis for understanding the symbols and language of twenty-first century social movements.

Over the past two decades, there has been growing interest in improving black men's health and the health disparities affecting them. Yet, the health of black men consistently ranks lowest across nearly all groups in the United States. Evidence on the health and social causes of morbidity and mortality among black men has been narrowly concentrated on public health problems (e.g., violence, prostate cancer, and HIV/AIDS) and determinants of health (e.g., education and male gender socialization). This limited focus omits age-specific leading causes of death and other social determinants of health, such as discrimination, segregation, access to health care, employment, and income. This review discusses the leading causes of death for black men and the associated risk factors, as well as identifies gaps in the literature and presents a racialized and gendered framework to guide efforts to address the persistent inequities in health affecting black men.

Recent events related to police brutality and the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter provides an empirical case to explore the vitality of social media data for social movements and the evolution of collective identities. Social media data provide a portal into how organizing and communicating generate narratives that survive over time. We analyse 31.65 million tweets about Ferguson across four meaningful time periods: the death of Michael Brown, the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson, the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, and the one year aftermath of Brown’s death. Our analysis shows that #BlackLivesMatter evolved in concert with protests opposing police brutality occurring on the ground. We also show how #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) has operated as the primary counter narrative to #BlackLivesMatter. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and increased political polarization following the election of Donald Trump.

Can a diverse crowd of individuals whose interests focus on distinct issues related to racial identity, class, gender, and sexuality mobilize around a shared issue? If so, how does this process work in practice? To date, limited research has explored intersectionality as a mobilization tool for social movements. This paper unpacks how intersectionality influences the constituencies represented in one of the largest protests ever observed in the United States: the Women's March on Washington in January 2017. Analyzing a data set collected from a random sample of participants, we explore how social identities influenced participation in the Women's March. Our analysis demonstrates how individuals' motivations to participate represented an intersectional set of issues and how coalitions of issues emerge. We conclude by discussing how these coalitions enable us to understand and predict the future of the anti-Trump resistance.