Labor scholars and union activists have long argued that the revitalization of the USlabor movement depends on the success of rank-and-file members transforming their unions into more democratic organizations that can properly channel and support militancy. The dominance of the bureaucratic business unionism model has been derided for its inability to successfully wage class struggle, and it has been noted at times that entrenched union bureaucrats can be just as repressive as management or the state. However, there has previously never been a systematic study of how this repression occurs. Using interviews and historical data such as newspaper articles, blogposts, books and scholarly articles three case studies are examined: the establishment and transformation of UAW 2865 over two decades, the 2019-2020 COLA wildcat strike starting at UC Santa Cruz, and the 2013 MAP test boycott (wildcat partial strike). Three mechanisms of repression are identified: containment, demobilization, and credit stealing. Containment is a preventive barrier established between dissident rank-and-file members and other members that blocks the former’s influence over the latter. Demobilization are those actions which shut down dissident or autonomous organizing or actions. Credit stealing is assigning credit for work done by others or asserting oneself as the leader or rightful representative of a movement that one did not support or participate in.

Abortion in the United States is generally considered a highly contested moral andpolitical issue. Two competing activist frameworks tend to dominate the public conversation around abortion. Yet the experience of having an abortion is socially complex, often shaped by inconsistent cultural schemas related to motherhood, medicine, life, and death. Little empirical research examines how people talk about the morality of their own abortion experiences. In this dissertation I examine how individuals who have abortions construct moral identities in the face of persistent gendered stigma. The dissertation is in the format of three research papers. In the first paper, I analyze 156 personal narratives from an abortion storytelling website. I identify four discursive frameworks used to confront the problem of abortion as a morally controversial act. In the second paper, I examine eighteen in-depth interviews with cisgender women who obtained abortions after receiving a diagnosis for a serious fetal condition. I examine how participants maintained moral worth and constructed symbolic boundaries between themselves and those who have abortions for reasons other than fetal health. In the last paper, I question why, despite an unambivalent embrace of motherhood ideals and severe fetal diagnoses, this group of women experienced abortion stigma. I identify a need for a theoretical reorientation toward defining abortion stigma as a multi-level social process embedded in existing structures of power and inequality. The findings of this research contribute to an evolving discussion of how the perspectives of people who have had abortions fit into abortion rights discourses and the broader public sphere.

Through content analysis, the study traces the relative prominence of “biomedical” and “public health” approaches in congressional bills aimed at improving the health of racial and ethnic minorities over a 28-year period. It documents a surge of interest in minority health during the late 1980s and early 1990s and highlights the dominance of biomedical initiatives during this period. Drawing on historical methods and interviews with key informants, the paper explains these patterns by detailing the ways in which policy legacies shaped the interests, opportunities and ideas of interest groups and policy-makers.