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AbstractEnvironmental justice research highlights the distinct processes generating environmental problems in rural places. Rural communities of color suffer the dual disadvantage of spatial and racial marginalization, yet we know little about the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. This study draws on theories of settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to investigate the historical formation of water inequality in the American Southwest. In 1962, Congress authorized two water projects to divide the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and New Mexico. The Navajo Indian Irrigation project (NIIP) would develop family farms on the Navajo Nation, while the San Juan‐Chama Project (SJCP) diverted water into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. While New Mexico's project was completed ahead of schedule in 1973, the NIIP has yet to be finished today, almost six decades later. Using archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts, this study examines racial meanings in the years leading up to NIIP approval. Findings reveal that settler officials used the NIIP as a mechanism to appropriate Native resources. I show how racial projects within NIIP negotiations contributed to colonial domination by diminishing the political sovereignty of the Navajo Nation.

Four theoretical perspectives-role theory, family theory, person/life span theory, and a holistic, developmental, systems-oriented theory-that examine critical person-in-environment transitions through the life span are described and compared with respect to central theme/world hypothesis, unit of analysis, treatment of change, problem formulation, methodology, and types of research conducted. Areas are indicated where study of critical transitions can be profitably pursued.

When challenged, states frequently respond with discursive campaigns meant to undercut the legitimacy of social movements. However, we know little about how the social and cultural status of challengers affects the state's discursive response. We address this gap by analyzing an important historical case of human rights activism in Communist Czechoslovakia. Despite its long history of violence and repression, Czechoslovakia signed several international human rights covenants during the 1970s to improve its reputation. A group of citizens that included well-known political, social, and cultural figures soon formed a domestic movement for human rights known as Charter 77. Drawing on state media articles, we analyze the state's public response to Charter 77. Results highlight four discursive strategies through which the state sought to undermine the cultural legitimacy of the movement: vilification through character assaults, message distortion that constructed activists as enemies of socialism, symbolic amplification of socialist values, and the co-optation of culturally valued identities to speak as state proxies. By further developing the concept of discursive obstruction, we show how the state navigated the complex cultural field in its effort to suppress high-profile human rights activists.

Decades of scholarship have established that dissident activity provokes state repression when it threatens elite interests and legitimacy, but there has been research attention on how state repression diffuses through institutional channels such as courts. Legal settings operate as a key site for the construction and implementation of elite discursive strategies used to undercut the legitimacy of protesters and justify repression. Social movement research on repression and social control often glosses over these elite framing strategies, limiting our understanding of relationship between elite meaning work and repression. We address these gaps in the literature by examining the state's framing of a worker revolt against a 1953 currency reform in communist Czechoslovakia. Drawing on extensive archival materials, we analyze how the regime framed the event and how official frames influenced the legal repression of protest participants. Our research has important implications for understanding the relationship between legal repression and state cultural work.

Background ; Face mask use offers an important public health tool for reducing the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), yet the politicization of COVID-19 has resulted in uneven adherence. This study assesses the effects of setting characteristics and the sociodemographic composition of crowds on group-level masking rates. ; Methods ; We conducted 123 site observations of masking behavior at public locations across Oklahoma (USA) between June and September 2020. We used analyses of variance and t-tests to examine variation in masking and ordinary least squares regression to model the effect of setting and sociodemographic characteristics on site-level masking rates. ; Results ; The masking rate across all sites averaged 34% but varied widely. Site-level masking rates were higher at metropolitan sites and sites with a store or municipal masking mandate. The masking rate at sites where women or older adults (60+) were the predominant group did not differ significantly from other sites. Ethnically diverse sites exhibited significantly higher masking rates compared with predominantly white sites. Findings indicate that setting characteristics explained a greater amount of variation in collective masking rates than sociodemographic differences. ; Conclusions ; This study underscores the importance of place and policy for mask adherence. In the absence of state-level mandates, masking policies at a more local level may be effective. ; This work was supported by a University of Oklahoma Vice President for Research and Partnerships COVID-19 Rapid Response Seed Grant. ; Yes

While research has established how elite actors can work to protect structures that contribute to environmental harm, relatively less is known about the cultural resources that can serve elite interests at the local level. In cases of localized pollution, multiple groups have vested interests in protecting corporate legitimacy. We draw on treadmill of production theory and collective identity to analyze a case of community petrochemical contamination. Specifically, we asked: (1) how elite actors appropriated cultural resources to protect productivity following a legitimization crisis; and (2) how discursive retaliation matters in understanding the pathways to violence when protest threatens an industrial community's economic identity. Our data for this research included in‐depth interviews, newspaper coverage, and archival data. Findings indicate that the corporation, the city, and corporate employees responded to local environmental activism with a discursive campaign that ultimately paved the way for widespread threats and retaliation against the residents. This research highlights the ways in which local proponents of the energy industry can take advantage of cultural resources to suppress challengers to the industry.

Researchers engaged in long-term disaster research are uniquely positioned to influence, inform, and shape long-term disaster recovery trajectories of communities being studied. For this reason, it is crucial for researchers to be critical of their methodological choices and make ethical decisions about the research methods they employ to generate and communicate data. In this article, we argue that making ethical decisions about research processes requires an emphasis on recognition, the acknowledgment, and respect of difference, a key pillar of environmental justice. We share an experience implementing a long-term disaster research protocol (Project Building Resilience through Innovation and Diverse Group Engagement) that includes the deliberate involvement of community members in the research process as Community Specialists and discuss how their engagement contributed to recognition and more ethical research practices. Throughout the article, we provide a blueprint for other long-term disaster researchers seeking to integrate Community Specialists into their own work and discuss potential implementation barriers and recommendations to overcome challenges.