Nearly all research on the effects of women’s self-defense training examines college age or, less frequently, adolescent populations. This study broadens that focus by evaluating the effectiveness of self-defense training for an adult community population, ages 18–77 years, comparing students who completed a 9-hr community-based empowerment self-defense course to similar women who did not take the course. Participants who completed the empowerment self-defense course reported significantly less sexual assault at the 1-year follow-up as well as significantly greater self-defense self-efficacy, more accurate knowledge about sexual assault and the possibility of resistance, and less self-silencing than those who did not take the course. This research provides the first systematic evidence that empowerment self-defense training can be effective in preventing assault in adult populations outside of educational contexts. Empowerment self-defense training is therefore an important part of sexual assault prevention efforts. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684319897937

Social movement frames are dynamic, shifting and embedded within an already existent cultural milieu—a milieu that affects mobilization opportunities. In this article, we invoke the concept of the “cultural clearinghouse” to tackle how broader cultural structures translate to frames or influence frame resonance. Our illustrative case, the Nobel Peace Prize, along with our use of topic modeling, a computational technique that identifies commonalities between texts, offer an important methodological advance for social movement scholars interested in culture, frame formation and resonance, and dynamic approaches to social movement discourse. Our findings show how peace discourse—as represented by Peace Prize acceptance speeches—increasingly has become embedded within broader cultural emphases on globalization and neoliberalism, versus earlier Christian and global institutional schemas. We conclude by discussing the usefulness of our conceptual and methodological advance for movement scholars with special attention to the coupling of new computational techniques and more traditional methods.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between culture and networks. Sense-making is a collective activity and, therefore, subject to network processes. This chapter builds on work that approaches this relationship using formal methods with an interest in how meaning is structured. It describes two approaches to analyzing meaning from a structural position: text networks that model the relationships between texts based on overlapping content and subject-action-object networks that model the content of a text corpus by digging deeper into the grammatical relationships between words. These approaches are illustrated with analyses of the classic US Works Progress Administration interviews with formerly enslaved Americans from the 1930s.

Institutional discrimination refers to prejudicial practices and policies within institutions that result in the systematic denial of resources and opportunities to members of subordinate groups. This form of discrimination is maintained by the laws, organizational guidelines, or traditions of an institution. Institutional discrimination occurs in both direct and indirect forms. Direct institutional discrimination refers to explicit institutional or state‐level policies, such as Jim Crow laws, which can facilitate long term multigenerational patterns of disparity between dominant and subordinate groups. Indirect institutional discrimination consists of policies and practices that differentially affect subordinate groups without an explicit intent to harm: Indirect institutional discrimination may be reinforced through the equal application of a given policy that engenders differential treatment or through the differential enforcement of policies that are seemingly neutral. Even if a discriminatory law is overturned or a longstanding tradition is challenged, changes in discriminatory behavior may not follow suit, particularly when legislation only addresses the symptoms of discrimination while ignoring the cause.

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