Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

Collective Action and the Problem of Embeddedness

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Divergent conceptions of homophily fall within a broader sociological debate about the freedom of an individual given the structural constraints of his or her context. As Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts argue, “one can always ask to what extent the observed outcome reflects the preferences and intentions of the individuals themselves and to what extent it is a consequence of the social-organizational structure in which they are embedded” (Kossinets & Watts, 2009). If our neighborhoods are segregated is it because individuals prefer to live in ‘like’ communities, or is it due to deeper correlations between race and socio-economic status? If our friends enjoy the same activities as ourselves, is it because we prefer to spend time with people who share our tastes, or because we met those friends through a shared activity?

The tension between these two approaches is what Granovetter called the “problem of embeddedness,” (Granovetter, 1985) because neither the agent-based nor structural view captures the whole picture. As Granovettor argued, “actors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations.”

The challenge of embeddedness can be seen acutely in network homophily research, as scholars try to account for both the role of individual agency and the structures which shape available options. In their yearlong study of university relationships, Kossinets and Watts observe that both agent-driven and structurally-induced homophily play integral roles in tie formation. Indeed, the two mechanisms “appear to act as substitutes, each reinforcing the observed tendency of similar individuals to interact” (Kossinets & Watts, 2009). In detailed, agent-based studies, Schelling finds that individual preference leads to amplified global results; that extreme structural segregation can result from individuals’ moderate preference against being in the minority (Schelling, 1971). Mutz similarly argues that the workplace serves as an important setting for diverse political discourse precisely because it is a structured institution in which individual choice is constrained (Mutz & Mondak, 2006).

Consider also Michael Spence’s economic model of gender-based pay disparity (Spence, 1973). Imagine an employee pool in which people have two observable characteristics: sex and education. An employer assigns each employee to a higher or lower wage by inferring the unobserved characteristic of productivity. Assume also that gender and productivity are perfectly uncorrelated. Intuitively, this should mean that gender and pay will also be uncorrelated, however Spence’s game-theoretic model reveals a surprising result. After initial rounds of hiring, the employer will begin to associate higher levels of education with higher levels of productivity. More precisely, because an employer’s opinions are conditioned on gender as well as education, “if at some point in time men and women are not investing in education in the same ways, then the returns to education for men and women will be different in the next round.” In other words, Spence finds that there are numerous system equilibria and, given differing initial investments in education, the pay schedules for men and women will settle into different equilibrium states.

Here again, we see the interaction of agency and structure. Whether initial investments in education differed because of personal taste or as the result of structural gender discrimination, once a gender-based equilibrium has been reached, individual investment in education does little to shift the established paradigm. A woman today may be paid less because women were barred from educational attainment two generations ago. That inequity may be further compounded by active discrimination on the part of an employer, but the structural history itself is enough to result in disparity. Furthermore, this structural context then sets the stage for inducing gender-based homophily, as men and women could be socially inclined towards different workplaces or career paths.

Given these complex interactions, where past individual choices accumulate into future social context, it is perhaps unsurprising that teasing apart the impact of agency and structure is no small feat; one that is virtually impossible in the absence of dynamic data (Kossinets & Watts, 2009). Individuals embedded within this system may similiarly struggle to identify their own role in shaping social structures. As Schelling writes, “people acting individually are often unable to affect the results; they can only affect their own positions within the overall results” (Schelling, 1971). Acting individually, we create self-sustaining segregated societies; opting into like communities and presenting our children with a narrow range of friends with whom to connect.

Yet the very role that individual actions play in building social structures indicates that individuals may work together to change that structural context. It is a classic collective action problem – if we collectively prefer diverse communities, than we must act collectively, not individually. In her extensive work on collective action problems, Elinor Ostrom finds that “individuals frequently do design new institutional arrangements – and thus create social capital themselves through covenantal processes” (Ostrom, 1994). Embeddedness presents a methodological challenge but it need not be a problem; it simply reflects the current, changeable, institutional arrangement. That individual actions create the structures which in turn effect future actions need not be constraining – indeed, it illustrates the power which individuals collectively posses: the power to shape context, create social structures, and to build social capital by working together to solve our collective problems.

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Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American journal of sociology, 481-510.

Kossinets, G., & Watts, D. J. (2009). Origins of homophily in an evolving social network. American journal of sociology, 115(2), 405-450.

Mutz, D. C., & Mondak, J. J. (2006). The Workplace as a Context for Cross‐Cutting Political Discourse. Journal of politics, 68(1), 140-155.

Ostrom, E. (1994). Covenants, collective action, and common-pool resources.

Schelling, T. C. (1971). Dynamic models of segregation. Journal of mathematical sociology, 1(2), 143-186.

Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355-374.

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Snow Days

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Snow days can cause chaos insofar as everything that was scheduled for a snow day needs to be rescheduled for a subsequent day; perhaps even the immediately following day – thus cramming two days of work into one.

Which is surprising, perhaps, because the snow day itself had no shortage of work either.

But somehow time just got all messed up; after a snow day things just don’t quite occur in the right order any more.

But I appreciate snow days as a humbling experience – they come as a reminder that sometimes even the most pressing meetings can still survive being postponed for a day.

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Nevertheless, she persisted

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One can only imagine that Senator Mitch McConnell had no idea of the sort of reaction he would get when he said of his fellow senator, Elizabeth Warren:

She was warned.
She was given an explanation.
Nevertheless, she persisted.

Warren, as Slate explains, had been “reading aloud from a scathing 1986 letter Coretta Scott King wrote opposing Sessions as a potential federal judge, when McConnell interrupted her mid-sentence to invoke a rule that prevents senators from ascribing ‘unbecoming’ conduct to another senator.”

The vote to silence Warren fell upon party lines, highlighting the fact that while the rule itself may be good, it’s applicability to Warren’s statements is debatable.

And McConnell’s comments afterwards only serves to emphasize the deeper divide: generations of women who have lived their whole lives being silenced and belittled by men hear a ringing truth in his mansplaining poetry:

She was warned.
She was given an explanation.
Nevertheless, she persisted.

I want to write that up and put it on my wall. Right next to my other pseudo-inspirational sign from Camus’ the Myth of Sisyphus:

They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

It’s the kind of statement that inspires the powerless to rebelliousness; that encourages resistance and strengthens resolve. Those with power will do everything they can to punish you, to silence you, to eliminate you – but no matter how many times that boulder rolls down, you keep pushing it back up. Because when you’re on the side of justice, the darkness cannot prevail.

She was warned.
She was given an explanation.
Nevertheless, she persisted.

 

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Protest / Life Balance

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There’s been so much going on in the world that it’s been hard – if not impossible – to keep up. And this is not strictly in terms of news, though there’s a lot of that too. But there are so many rallies, protests, phone calls, and other important forms of resistance, that doing them all is definitely impossible.

But that’s okay.

Engaging in civic work is a marathon, not a sprint. You got to hydrate along the way.

John Dewey argued that democracy is a way of living, and I like to think that this is partly what he meant. That is – it’s not just a question of how many protests you go to, it’s how you integrate protests into your life.

When people talk about “resistance fatigue” or argue that protest participation will slowly dissipate, this is what they’re referring to – if civic engagement isn’t part of how you live your life, it will always feel like this awkwardly tacked-on thing that’s holding you back from the real business of the day.

We have lives, families, jobs; responsibilities that make a life of nothing but full-on political engagement impossible no matter what the political climate. The trick, I think, is making civic engagement – whether through protest or otherwise – one of these core pieces of your life.

You can’t do it all; none of us can do it all.

But democracy as a way of living means embracing civic duty as a core value; it means showing up and creating space for others’ to have their voices heard. It doesn’t mean sporadically and  frantically throwing  some civic actions into your day; it means living in a democratic way: engaging as a way of life.

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Noncooperation and the Latency of Weak Ties

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As Centola and Macy summarize, the key insight of Granovetter’s seminal 1973 work (Granovetter, 1973) is that ties which are “weak in the relational sense – that the relations are less salient or frequent – are often strong in the structural sense – that they provide shortcuts across social topology” (Centola & Macy, 2007). While this remains an important sociological finding, there are important reasons to be wary of generalizing too far: such ‘weak ties’ may not be sufficient for diffusion in complex contagion (Centola & Macy, 2007) and identification of such ties is highly dependent on how connections are defined and measured (Grannis, 2010).

Furthermore, recent studies probing just how far ‘the strength of weak ties’ can be taken allude to another underexplored concern: the latency of ties. For example, Grannis points to the oft glossed-over result of Milgram’s small world experiment (Milgram, 1967): 71% of the chains did not make it to their target. As Milgram explains, “chains die before completion because on each remove a certain portion of participants simply do not cooperate and fail to send the folder. Thus the results we obtained on the distribution of chain lengths occurred within the general drift of a decay curve.” Milgram and later Dodds et al. (Dodds, Muhamad, & Watts, 2003) correct for this decay by including in the average path length an estimation of how long uncompleted paths would be if they had in fact been completed. For his part, Grannis argues that the failure caused by such noncooperation is exactly the point: “it calls into question what efficiency, if any, could be derived from these hypothesized, noncooperative paths” (Grannis, 2010).

I call this a problem of latency because one can imagine that social ties aren’t always reliably activated. Rather, activation may occur as a function of relationship strength and task burden, or may simply vary stochastically. In their global search email task, Dodds et al. find that only 25% of self-registered participants actually initiated a chain, whereas 37% of subsequent participants – those who were recruited by an acquaintance of some sort – did carry on the chain (Dodds et al., 2003). They attribute this difference to the very social relations they are studying: who does the asking matters.

In their survey of non-participants, the authors further find that “less than 0.3% of those contacted claimed that they could not think of an appropriate recipient, suggesting that lack of interest or incentive, not difficulty, was the main reason for chain termination.” Again, this implies that not all asks are equal – the noncomplying participants could have continued the chain, but they chose not to. In economic terms, it seems that the activation cost – the cost of continuing the chain – was greater than the reward for participating.

One can imagine similar interactions in the job-search domain. Passing on information about a job-opening maybe relatively low-cost while actively recommending a candidate for a position may come with certain risk (Smith, 2005). In many ways, the informational nature of a job search is reminiscent of ‘top-of-mind’ marketing: it is good if customers choose your product when faced with a range of options, but ideally they would think of you first; they would chose to purchase your product before even being confronted with alternatives. In the job-search scenario, unemployed people are often encouraged to reach out to as many contacts as they can, in order keep their name top-of-mind so that these ‘weak ties’ – who otherwise may not have thought of them – do forward information when learning of job openings. Granovetter does not examine the job search process in detail, but his findings – that among people who found a new job through a contact, 55.6% saw that contact occasionally while another 27.8% saw that contact only rarely (Granovetter, 1973) – imply that information was most likely diffused by a job-seeker requesting information. In this case, the job seeker had to activate a latent weak tie before receiving its benefit.

Arguably, the concept of latency is built into the very definition of a weak tie – weak ties are weak because their latency makes them easier to maintain than strong, always-active ties. Yet, the latency of weak ties, or more precisely, their activation costs, are generally not considered. In his detailed study of three distinct datasets, Grannis finds that a key problem in network interpretation is that connections’ temporal nature is often over looked (Grannis, 2010). I would argue that a related challenge is that the observed relations are considered to always be active. Using Grannis’ example, there is nothing inherently wrong with the suggestion that ideas may flow from A to C over the course of 40 years; the problem comes in interpreting this as a simple network where C’s beliefs directly trace to A. Indeed, in the academic context, it’s quite reasonable to think that an academic ‘grandparent’ may influence one’s scholarly work – but that influence comes through in some ideas and not others, it comes through connections whose strength waxes and wanes. To consider these links always present, and always active, is indeed to neglect the true nature of the relationship.

Ultimately, Grannis argues that the core problem in many network models is that the phase transitions which govern global network characteristics are sensitive to local-level phenomena: if the average degree is measured to be 1, there will be a giant component. Given this sensitivity, it becomes essential to consider the latency of weak network ties. A candidate who doesn’t activate weak ties may never find a job, and a message-passing task for which participants feel unmotivated may never reach completion. In his pop-science article, Malcolm Gladwell argues that some people just feel an inherent motivation to maintain more social ties than others (Gladwell, 1999). Given such individual variation in number of ties and willingness to activate ties, it seems clear that the latency of weak ties needs further study, otherwise, as Grannis warns, our generalizations could lead to “fundamental errors in our understanding of the effects of network topology on diffusion processes” (Grannis, 2010).

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Centola, D., & Macy, M. (2007). Complex contagions and the weakness of long ties. American journal of sociology, 113(3), 702-734.

Dodds, P. S., Muhamad, R., & Watts, D. J. (2003). An experimental study of search in global social networks. Science, 301(5634), 827-829.

Gladwell, M. (1999). Six degrees of lois weisberg.

Grannis, R. (2010). Six Degrees of “Who Cares?”. American journal of sociology, 115(4), 991-1017.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American journal of sociology, 1360-1380.

Milgram, S. (1967). The small world problem. Psychology today, 2(1), 60-67.

Smith, S. S. (2005). “Don’t put my name on it”: Social Capital Activation and Job-Finding Assistance among the Black Urban Poor American journal of sociology, 111(1), 1-57.

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On Violence and Protest

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the role of violence in social movements. Such violence could take many forms, from punching nazis to property damage.

Conventional wisdom among the mainstream left is that such violence isn’t a good tactic: not only is morally problematic, it is typically unsuccessful.

In his biography of Gandhi, Bhikhu Parekh describes Gandhi’s utility argument against violence, which went hand in hand with his moral argument against violence:

Gandhi further argued that violence rarely achieved lasting results. An act of violence was deemed to be successful when it achieved its immediate objectives. However, if it were to be judged by its long-term consequences, our conclusion would have to be very different. Every apparently successful act of violence encouraged the belief that it was the only effective way to achieve the desired goal, and developed the habit of using violence every time ran into opposition. Society thus became used to it and never felt compelled to explore an alternative. Violence also tended to generate an inflammatory spiral. Every successful use blunted the community’s moral sensibility and raised its threshold of violence, so that over time an increasingly larger amount became necessary to achieve the same results.

There are some compelling points in that argument, but it fails to address the larger question: is violence never a justifiable means for social change, either morally or pragmatically?

After all, Gandhi’s level of commitment to non-violence may not be the example we want to follow. In an extreme example of pacifism, Gandhi wrote of Jews in World War II Germany:

And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring [Jews] an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can…The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

In contrast to Gandhi’s view, there are many reasons to think violence in response to genocide may be permissible – or should even be encouraged.

My friend Joshua Miller recently reflected on this question, writing:

…in many ways, the canonization of Gandhi and Martin Luther King have served to create an artificial standard of non-violence that no social movement can ever really achieve and that neither the Civil Rights movement nor the Indian independence movement actually achieved. Plus, if violent repression by the police goes unmentioned in the media but activist violence becomes a regular topic of debate, then it will appear that the only violence is coming from the activists. 

I particularly appreciate his insight regarding the ‘canonization’ of Gandhi and King – they both deserve praise for their work and impacts, but we tend to enshrine them as peaceful activists who could do no wrong; who should be emulated at all costs. Malcolm X, on the other hand, is pushed by the wayside, his story is less told. Yet he did have an important and lasting impact on the American civil rights movement; could King’s pacifism have succeeded without Malcom X’s radicalism?

I have no easy answers to these question; indeed, such easy answers do not exist. But I think we owe it to ourselves to think through these questions – is violent protest ever morally justified? If it can be morally justified at times, is it ever pragmatically justified? Do our collective memories of history really capture what happened, or do we tell ourselves a simpler, softer story – do we only remember the way we wish it had happened?

Perhaps, as Camus wrote, there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.

 

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We Will Not Stop

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There have been a lot of theories floating around that some of the most egregious actions of the Trump administration – such as the confusion over whether the executive order banned green card holders – was intended to promote protest fatigue. So by the time all the really horrible stuff started happening, we’d all be too worn out to resist.

It’s reasonable to think that such a Machiavellian tactic would work – after all, the balance of fighting back and continuing life as normal is a precarious one. We still have bills to pay and work to do.

But if that’s the aim of the administration, I think they underestimate the outrage their policies cause; I think they underestimate the American commitment to democracy and pluralism. There may be a white supremacist serving as a senior advisor to the President, but we will not allow his vision for America to become what America is.

We are better than that and we will not stop fighting.

Perhaps I am naive to have such optimism – and goodness knows I am generally not one for optimism – but…today marks the 5 year anniversary of my father’s death. He was a radical, and he taught me to be a radical. I can think of no better way to mark this date than by attending a rally to make Massachusetts a ‘sanctuary state.’

At that rally, they warned of the danger of protest fatigue while the crowd chanted, “we will not stop. We will not stop.”

And, indeed, we won’t. We will not stop; there is so much work to do.

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Seven Countries

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On Friday, President Trump signed an Executive Order targeting immigrants and refugees from 7 majority Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The order has been met with strong protests, questions about it’s legality, and numerous horror stories about children detained in isolation and Iraqi interpreters – who risked their lives and the lives of their families in service to our country – being barred entry.

I’ve been trying to figure out where that list of seven countries comes from. As it turns out, this is not a particularly easy task.

The Executive Order does not refer to the countries directly. Rather, it reads:

I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,

INA refers to the Immigration and Nationality Act which was originally created in 1952, though it has been amended several times since then. As the INA website explains:

Although it stands alone as a body of law, the Act is also contained in the United States Code (U.S.C.). The code is a collection of all the laws of the United States…When browsing the INA or other statutes you will often see reference to the U.S. Code citation…Although it is correct to refer to a specific section by either its INA citation or its U.S. code, the INA citation is more commonly used.

So, when the Executive Order refers to “217(a)(12) of the INA” and “8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12),” those are two citations for the same thing, both included for completeness.

Now, Section 217 of the INA deals with “Visa Waiver Program for Certain Visitors” and 217(a) reads:

(a) ESTABLISHMENT OF PROGRAM.-The Attorney General and the Secretary of State are authorized to establish a program (hereinafter in this section referred to as the “program”) under which the requirement of paragraph (7)(B)(i)(II) of section 212(a) may be waived by the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of State, and in accordance with this section, in the case of an alien who meets the following requirements:

Bullet points (1) – (11) then list the requirements for “aliens” receiving a waiver.

Now, I’m no legal scholar, but there is no bullet point 12.

The text for the INA is hosted by the Department for Homeland Security, and the text for the related United States Code, 8 U.S.C. 1187, is hosted by the U.S. Government Publishing Office. Neither website includes a point 12. So I could tell you about 217(a)(11) of the INA and 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(11), but I can’t tell you about the law referenced in President Trump’s Executive Order: section 217(a)(12) of the INA or 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12).

So where does that list of 7 countries come from?

I assumed I must be going about this all wrong, and that someone else had figured it all out already.

I looked at the New York Times helpful annotation of the Executive Order. Following the paragraph referencing section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), the New York Times annotates:

The countries are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

But where does that list of 7 countries come from?

President Trump has argued that his order is not substantially different from measures taken by President Obama (Fact Check: False). The list of countries may have come from President Obama, however, as CNN indicates:

In December 2015, President Obama signed into law a measure placing limited restrictions on certain travelers who had visited Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria on or after March 1, 2011. Two months later, the Obama administration added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen to the list, in what it called an effort to address “the growing threat from foreign terrorist fighters.”

This implies that the list of affected countries can be found in two press releases from the Department of Homeland Security, the first from January 21, 2016 reads:

The United States today began implementing changes under the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 (the Act). U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) welcomes more than a million passengers arriving to the United States every day and is committed to facilitating legitimate travel while maintaining the highest standards of security and border protection. Under the Act, travelers in the following categories are no longer eligible to travel or be admitted to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP):

  • Nationals of VWP countries who have traveled to or been present in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria on or after March 1, 2011 (with limited exceptions for travel for diplomatic or military purposes in the service of a VWP country).
  • Nationals of VWP countries who are also nationals of Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria.

The second release from February 18, 2016 then adds Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as “countries of concern.”

Now, Politifact has a great comparison between President Obama’s and President Trump’s policies…but I’m still unclear on how the 2016 list of countries ended up in President Trump’s Executive Order. And what is the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 anyway?

I’m glad you asked.

The official Congressional website indicates the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 as coming from H.R.158: An act to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide enhanced security measures for the visa waiver program, and for other purposes.

This act was approved by the house and voted into law as part of an appropriations act (HR 2029).

Now, this bill includes:

(SEC. 3) Section 217(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1187(a)), as amended by this Act, is further amended by adding at the end the following: (12) NOT PRESENT IN IRAQ, SYRIA, OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY OR AREA OF CONCERN.

…in a country that is designated by the Secretary of State under section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act of 1979 (50 U.S.C. 2405) (as continued in effect under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)), section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2780), section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2371), or any other provision of law, as a country, the government of which has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism;

None of that is particularly helpful, though again the related Homeland Security press release identifies the affected countries as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria, with Libya, Somalia, and Yemen added a month later.

Now, while I still don’t understand why there isn’t a section 217(a)(12) of the INA, it’s important to note that this list of countries was affected by a visa waiver program. As the DHS release clarifies:

These individuals will still be able to apply for a visa using the regular immigration process at our embassies or consulates. For those who need a U.S. visa for urgent business, medical, or humanitarian travel to the United States, U.S. embassies and consulates stand ready to process applications on an expedited basis.

And it goes on – as HR 158 does – to clarify that the change will not effect foreign nationals who were in the named countries “in order to perform military service in the armed forces of a program country.”

So those Iraqi interpreters?

Yeah, we should let them in.

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WUNC

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There have been a number of rallies, protests, and marches lately, which has gotten me thinking about Charles’ Tilly’s delightful acronym WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. As Tilly writes:

The term WUNC sounds odd, but it represents something quite familiar. WUNC displays can take the form of statements, slogans, or labels that imply worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.

The combination of tactics used and WUNC displays, Tilly argues, is what gives a campaign its distinctiveness.

Consider the Pussyhats of the women’s march: the sea of pink emphasized the march’s impressive numbers and indicated participant’s unity. Importantly, this type of display operates on both an external and internal level. That is, observers note participant’s numbers and unity; while participants get energized by the event’s numbers and unity.

This internal effect is particularly important because rallies often serve primarily as a mechanism to energy loyal participants, rather than as tactic to achieve a direct outcome.

When I was headed to yesterday’s protest against President Trump’s anti-immigrant legislation, I was thinking about this piece in particular. Would there be some visible element that would make a person’s participation in the rally clear? Probably not with such short notice.

There was a group on my train with their protest signs out. Another passenger stopped and started asking them questions; where was the rally today? What time did it start? What exactly did the targeted executive orders do?

On my way home following the rally, I got a lot of reactions to my own protest sign. Had I been protesting at the airport? How was the crowd at Copley? One woman just honked enthusiastically as I walked by.

There are so many things going on right now; so many ways that the pluralism of our society is under attack, it seems nearly impossible to come up with a single symbol that could encompass all we stand for and all we believe.

But maybe we don’t have to. A WUNC display doesn’t need to be as tidy as matching hats or colorful pins. Perhaps a miscellaneous smattering of signage is enough. Perhaps these varied messages – some funny, some sad, some angry, some simple, each subject to the peculiarities of its maker – perhaps each of the signs are indeed united under a single banner: resist.

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