Foundational work in social movement scholarship maintains that coming into full awareness of the scope of the injustices one faces is essential for an individual’s engagement in social movement activity. This study draws on interview data with family members who belonged to the Association of the Families of the Martyrs of the Abu Salim Prison Massacre, which began demonstrating on behalf of disappeared men in Libya in 2007. For these families of forcibly disappeared men in Libya, uncertainty and ambiguity about whether their relatives remained alive was an important catalyst for collective action in a state where political organizing was strictly prohibited by law. One of the key findings of this study is that the denial of information about a disappeared relative and the uncertainty produced by his/her absent body is an important motivation for participation in collective action. These findings suggest that the preeminent role of certainty embedded within many social movement theories about how movements develop may not extend to many types of collective action, such as movements around the disappeared in Libya. Ambiguity and uncertainty can not only be important sources of compelling social movement activity but can actually be very effective in sustaining it over time.

Abstract Types of Gender Discrimination against Women of Saudi Arabia The Narrative of Saudi Women in their Own Words & Wounds Author: Fowziyah Abukhalid (professor of political sociology) Ironically, it could be noted that despite the absence of the Saudi Women in the public domain of their society, they have a massive presence in the main stream media on national and international levels. The question however is, do these media images reflect a representation of Saudi women. With the same token, it could be said that despite the enormous writing on the Saudi women, little is known about the perspective of the Saudi women themselves. Therefore, Serotype images were not only diming the reflection of Saudi females, but were also diluting types of gender discrimination against women in Saudi Arabia. This research took the initiative to be a representation of the voiceless perspectives of the Saudi women themselves by particularly studying gender discrimination against women based on their daily experiences in domestic and public domains. This was done through qualitative intensive interviews with 60 Saudi women, who live in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. The sample was highly selective to be a representation of different strata of the society, from working class to elite. It represents women from different ranks of jobs which are access able to women, from genitors to senators. The analysis of these interviews uncovered the complexity of the Saudi women's confrontation of gender discriminations. It seems to post a challenge to a number of commonly simplified assumptions about gender discrimination in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the analysis of the female sample's ethnography specifies the pluralistic nature of the gender discrimination against women in the Saudi society. It reveals at least five areas of confrontations: 1) Legal areas, represented by the campaign of lifting up male garden-ship over Saudi women. 2) Political participation, represented by the campaign of no taxation without representation. 3) The urgent need call for gender equality in employment. 4) The urgent importance of sociopolitical recognition of the multi- cultural nature of the Saudi society in its reflections on social status of women.5) the importance of rereading and rethinking both the cultural and the religious heritage on women by women. This research at the final analysis gives the reader a fresh eye in looking at gender discrimination against Saudi women outside the Western essentialism.

Mainstream media narratives position Israel as the victim to Palestinian violence, and as a result Palestinians are viewed by the West as inhibiting peace in the region. Extensive research has proven this narrative false, yet with such extreme US media bias in favor of Israel this fallacy often goes unchallenged by mainstream consumers. I argue that photographs from the Palestinian unarmed popular struggle against the Israeli Apartheid Wall have the ability to reframe this false narrative by visually highlighting Israeli violence onto the indigenous Palestinian people. Using the case study of the Palestinian unarmed resistance movement from 2003-2006, through the criteria of visual injustice symbols, I demonstrate how photographs can be strategically used by activists and scholars to inform outside communities of occurring injustices. For my research, I applied mixed qualitative research methods to obtain various types of data from 2002-2013. As a participant observer, I immersed myself in the popular struggle as a solidarity activist from 2003-2006. From 2007-2013, I conducted in-depth interviews with various Palestinian individuals who resisted the construction of the Wall to provide more first-hand data of the injustices occurring in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. During this time, I photographed the Palestinian movement against the Wall through a visual ethnography; utilizing photographs as data to provide evidence of Israeli violence onto unarmed Palestinians. My paper will analyze several photographs taken during the resistance to the Wall through the visual injustice symbol framework; juxtaposition, identification, universalization, innocence and moral/legal corruption, evoking an emotional response from the viewer. This collection of visual injustice symbols exposes unarmed Palestinians being violated by the Israeli state due to the establishment of the Wall, and by way of the Israeli Defense Forces. In essence, photographs of the Palestinian unarmed resistance movement visually combat the false media narratives, in turn reframing the narrative from “Palestinian as terrorist perpetrating the violence", to one of "Palestinian as victim of Israeli violence."