Heroes, villains, victims, and minions are more important than ever before in our politics and culture. In the era of television, Twitter, and Facebook, groups and individuals constantly battle over their reputations. One of the best ways to gain power is to persuade others that you are competent, courageous, and benevolent, while your opponents are none of these. Thus, character work consists of more than simple claims of fact; societies build their solidarity and policies out of admiration for heroes but also outrage over villains. Recent political analysis has ignored the great characters of the past in favor of frames, heuristics, codes, and identities. In Public Characters, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern argue that character, reputation, and images matter in politics, and social life more generally, as they help mobilize people and their passions. First, they focus on the political construction of openly constructed and debated public characters to show how we can allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions through them. The authors demonstrate the nuances of characters and their interactions across a range of sources-including Shakespeare, Game of Thrones, Renaissance sculpture, modern comic books, Alexander the Great, and Bernie Madoff-all the while showing how public characters are used in political rhetoric. Finally, they complicate these characters by considering their transformations: when victims manage to become heroes and the way traditional moral characters have evolved over time to correspond with what different cultures admire, detest, or pity. This rich, detailed, and wide-ranging analysis of personal images and reputation marks a timely and crucial contribution for sociologists and political scientists concerned with the cultural dimensions of political life.

Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics)

Politics & Social Sciences

Jasper, James M.

Young, Michael P.

Zuern, Elke

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

DREAMers and the Choreography of Protest (Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics)

DREAMers and the Choreography of Protest chronicles the history of the DREAMers--the term used to describe undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Based on interviews with lead activists, extensive archival research, and years of ethnographic study, Michael P. Young details the making of the DREAMer, the early organizing of undocumented youth on college campuses cooperating with nonprofit organizations, and the independent organizing of an online network of radical undocumented youth. Tracing a sequence of escalating protests--from sit-ins to detention center infiltrations and border crossing actions--Young argues that this later network of DREAMer activists pushed the immigrant rights movement away from the elite-driven, insider politics of immigration reform toward radical direct action organized by and for undocumented immigrants. In one of the first accounts of the radical factions of DREAMer activism, Young provides a detailed and engrossing counternarrative of DREAMer history that offers some pragmatic lessons for activists and the allied supporters of social movements.

Social Sciences

During the 1830s the United States experienced a wave of movements for social change over temperance, the abolition of slavery, anti-vice activism, and a host of other moral reforms. Michael Young argues for the first time in Bearing Witness against Sin that together they represented a distinctive new style of mobilization—one that prefigured contemporary forms of social protest by underscoring the role of national religious structures and cultural schemas.
In this book, Young identifies a new strain of protest that challenged antebellum Americans to take personal responsibility for reforming social problems.In this period activists demanded that social problems like drinking and slaveholding be recognized as national sins unsurpassed in their evil and immorality. This newly awakened consciousness undergirded by a confessional style of protest, seized the American imagination and galvanized thousands of people. Such a phenomenon, Young argues, helps explain the lives of charismatic reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Grimké sisters, among others. 
Marshalling lively historical materials, including letters and life histories of reformers, Bearing Witness against Sin is a revelatory account of how religion lay at the heart of social reform.

Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement

History

Americas

University of Chicago Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Young, Michael P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Young, Michael P.