Jonathan Coley

Author of "Mobilizing for Religious Freedom: Educational Opportunity Structures and Outcomes of Conservative Christian Campus Activism"

January 10, 2022

Jonathan S. Coley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. His research focuses on social movements, politics, religion, education, gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity. His first book, "Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities," was published by the University of North Carolina Press and received the Distinguished Book Award from the Mid-South Sociological Association in 2018. He has also published research in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Mobilization, Sociology of Religion, and Sociology of Education.

This chapter is included in the book Power and Protest, which is volume 44 of the "Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change book series."

Colleges and universities in the United States are common sites of social movement activism, yet scholars have said little about the conditions under which campus-based movements are likely to meet with success or failure. This study develops the concept of educational opportunity structures and highlights several dimensions of colleges and universities’ educational opportunity structures – specifically, schools’ statuses as public or private, secular or religious, highly or lowly ranked, and more or less wealthy – that can affect the outcomes of campus-based movements. Analyzing a religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt University, which mobilized from 2010 to 2012 to demand the ability of religious student organizations to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and religious belief, the chapter shows that Vanderbilt’s status as a private, secular, elite, and wealthy university ensured that conservative Christian activism at that school was highly unlikely to succeed.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2022-honorees/jonathan-coley

Last Updated: 7 February 2022