Contention

Wrapping up Contention's tenth volume feels like something of a milestone for all of us. After a decade of work, a journal that was once a small, punchy entity is now thoroughly established in its field. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the contributors, reviewers, editorial board members, and publishing staff who have helped this journal grow and who we look forward to continuing our work with in the decades to come.

This article offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of a form of solidarity in which one group spontaneously mobilizes in support of another, unrelated group. It is a fleeting solidarity based not on shared identity but on temporarily aligned goals, one aimed less at persistence and more at short-term impact. We call this drive-by solidarity because of its spontaneous, unilateral, and unsolicited nature. We argue that it is a “thinner” form of solidarity in comparison to “thicker” forms usually conceptualized in the social movement literature. We examine the case of Anonymous's “Operation KKK” (#OpKKK), an online hacktivist campaign to expose Ku Klux Klan members carried out in support of #BlackLivesMatter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, in November 2014, and we use social media data to show that, while BLM and Anonymous networks temporarily coordinated during the protests, there is no subsequent evidence of long-term coordination.

How did a local protest motivated by the murder of a poet's son grow into a national social movement? In this article, I examine the role of framing in the upward scale shift of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), a contentious actor that brought together victims of the Mexican war on crime, activists, and organizations to protest against violence. Following recent work on frame analysis, I analyze the different and contrasting reasons that led several groups from across the country to align with the MPJD's frames and find them as resonant. In addition, I discuss why, despite the existence of common goals, ideological incompatibilities caused multiple MPJD allies to withdraw their participation in the alliance shortly after the latter's initial actions.

Contention is everywhere nowadays, permeating the fabric of society and constituting an important element of many different social relationships. It is also a central topic across a wide range of social scientific disciplines. Following the most contentious decade in over a century, scholarship on the topic of “contention” is booming. Nonetheless, we still lack a conceptual approach to “contention” as a general academic term beyond the bounds of the study of “contentious politics.” What is the meaning of contention? Drawing on a decade of editorial and research work on contention, this article surveys the profound breadth and variety of academic research on the topic, ranging from politics, psychology, and sociology to material culture, criminology, and beyond. We outline the common conceptual thread across these various areas, where “contention” generally indicates conflictual collective contests concerning competing claims.

Most social movement scholars assume that the African American Civil Rights and Chicana/o/x Movements lasted no more than ten years. Framing these movements as “short,” rather than “long,” minimizes their complex, radical roots, reinforcing popular misconceptions that they had narrow goals, such as color-blindness. In this article, I utilize a case study approach to examine the long Chicana/o/x Movement on one specific campus—the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The movement on that campus began with the historic El Plan de Santa Barbara Conference in April 1969, and it continued into the 1990s with a ten-day hunger strike. It persisted into the late 2010s when Chicanx/Latinx students mobilized to preserve their beloved “home away from home,” El Centro Arnulfo Casillas.