James Macdonald Jasper (born 1957) is a writer and sociologist who has taught Ph.D. students at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York[3] since 2007.
Jasper taught at New York University from January 1987 to the summer of 1996, leaving after a protracted tenure battle that attracted angry letters from sociologists around the United States.
Since the fall of 2007 he has been affiliated with the sociology Ph.D. program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he founded the Politics and Protest Workshop.
His books include Nuclear Politics, about energy policy in France, Sweden, and the United States; The Animal Rights Crusade, an examination of the moral dimensions of protest coauthored with Dorothy Nelkin; The Art of Moral Protest, which developed cultural understandings of social movements and reintroduced emotions as an analytic dimension; Restless Nation, which looks at the negative and positive effects of Americans’ propensity to move so often; and Getting Your Way, which offers a sociological language for talking about strategic action that avoids the determinism of game theory.
His most influential contribution has been to show that emotions are a part of culture, allowing humans to adapt to the world around them, to process information, and to engage with others.
[5] In addition to Jeff Goodwin, Dorothy Nelkin, and Francesca Polletta, Jasper's coauthors have included former students Scott Sanders, Jane Poulsen, Cynthia Gordon, and Mary Bernstein.
Citizenship movements are "organized by and on behalf of categories of people excluded in some way from full human rights, political participation, or basic economic protections.
"[8] Almost by definition, then, citizenship movements make their claims primarily against the state, which generally serves as the original granter and primary enforcer of rights and other protections.
For instance, protesters who encourage individual consumers to recycle their glass and plastic containers may be less concerned with making claims against the state than with disseminating an important message as widely as possible.
In Chapter 3, Jasper advances a model of social movements containing four "autonomous dimensions":[9] resources, strategy, culture, and biography.
Lastly, biography is considered by Jasper to be the "individual constellations of cultural meanings, personalities, sense of self, derived from biographical experiences.