Racial Injustice, Violence, and Resistance: New Approaches Under Multidimensional Perspectives

“Racial Injustice, Violence, and Resistance: New Approaches from Multidimensional Perspectives” is the product of a dialogue among three experts, bridging the disciplines of economics, criminology, and sociology and bringing together expertise in racial inequality, urban sociology, international immigration, Latin America, and Latino/a/x studies. Over the past few years, our conversation has centered on emerging and prevailing trends, as well as countertrends, in social justice and grassroots resistance strategies in the United States and other parts of the world. This Special Issue was inspired by these discussions and the critical times in which we live. We hope that this editorial will encourage other scholars, researchers, and policymakers worldwide to continue working on these issues using interdisciplinary and multidimensional frameworks.

Since our call for papers included both national and international scholars, one key contribution of this Special Issue is its presentation of a broad and diverse spectrum of emerging research and policy recommendations from the perspectives of academics in ten countries across four continents. Our readers may notice that most papers in this Special Issue focus on Latin America, with a particular emphasis on Brazil. This reflects the editors’ ability to promote this editorial project within the specific venues and websites associated with our professional and personal networks. Nevertheless, as the featured thirteen papers reveal, our collective efforts exceeded our expectations, ultimately yielding a diverse collection of studies concerning the primary themes and preoccupations that motivated this publication.

This Special Issue highlights papers that attest to the turbulent and uncertain times we are experiencing, marked by the decline of social justice policies and guardrails in national and international contexts. After the initial enthusiasm for the design and institutionalization of democratic regimes that followed the Cold War, the first two decades of the twenty-first century unfolded as a succession of deadlocks caused by the expansion of globalization, financial and market deregulation (Stiglitz 2002), socioeconomic disparities between and within nations (Piketty 2017), and environmental catastrophes (Shukla and Skea 2022). The ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic complicated rising trends in social injustice, infecting almost seven hundred million people and claiming nearly seven million lives worldwide, especially immigrants and ethno-racial minorities, making this Special Issue, with a focus on social justice, even more timely and compelling.1 This publication addresses most of the concerns, emerging theories, and policies associated with persistent social inequality and new forms of injustices. While the various issues of social injustice are diverse and, at times, may appear disjointed, particularly within a global reality marked by numerous paradoxes, the collective contribution of the papers included demonstrates a notable coherence.

Our emphasis on Latin America, especially Brazil, helps us illustrate the paradoxes of modernization and social domination in the reproduction of inequality. Contemporary social control techniques have been developing alongside modernizing or “postmodern” strategies, primarily in recent years, through digital social media and sophisticated surveillance methods that involve ubiquitous algorithms and artificial intelligence (Zuboff 2015, 2019). Neoliberal, individualistic narratives combine with these developments to accelerate the creation of ever more efficient technologies of domination. Even so, amid growing individualism and social inequality, Latin America, particularly Brazil, has historically stood out for its sophisticated apparatus of social domination, combining exemplary punishments for “discontents” with seductive ideological tools of social and racial domination, such as racial democracy and a moral aversion to social conflict, which has been able to prevent the spread of social strife through depoliticization and criminalization. Whether this pattern originates in colonial times, in contexts of socioeconomic “modernization without social change”—as famously titled in Peter Eisenberg’s (1977) book—it displays particular efficacy in the present time (Hochuli 2021; Arantes 2021) Worldwide, Brazilization or Latin Americanization reveals the resurgence of an Iberian colonial past and style of domination and social control, as illustrated by Brazil’s history of “democratic” racial relations and the later American and South African “post-racial societies” (Paixão 2025; Theodoro 2022; Telles 2004).

Over a hundred years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois made the prophetic statement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (Du Bois 1989). Despite all that we have achieved against overt racial segregation and eugenics, several papers in this Special Issue testify to the persistent crucial role of racial discrimination, enduring injustices, and human rights violations in the everyday life experiences of racialized minorities, including dark-skinned people, sexual and gender minorities, and the poor, especially inner-city youth.

This Special Issue also includes several papers that examine one of the most tragic facets of contemporary human existence: forced international migration. The World Migration Report 2024 reveals that 117 million individuals were displaced in 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic. This figure encompasses 35.3 million refugees, 5.4 million asylum seekers, and 5.2 million individuals seeking international protection. Among this total, the number of internally displaced persons also reached 71.2 million, driven by civil unrest and outright conflict. This phenomenon has particularly impacted women (Fuentes-Mayorga 2023), who now increasingly lead international migration in Latin America and Europe. The World Migration Report 2024 also documents that 3.5% of women globally are categorized as international migrants (International Organization for Migration 2024, pp. 3–5).

An absence of effective global governance mechanisms to tackle this wave of human displacement fuels nativism and targeted violence against immigrants. In addition, growing job market insecurity and the disintegration of social protection mechanisms have contributed to the worldwide rise of far-right political ideologies that victimize immigrants, especially those stereotyped due to their ethnic or racial identities. Indeed, these trends have sparked a troubling resurgence of racist and xenophobic ideologies following the abandonment of policies for immigrant reception and regularization (Ambrosini and Hajer 2023) and efforts to reduce class, gender, and racial inequalities. In recent years, there has been a rising pattern of hate and violence that now threatens civil rights and the system of democracy in the United States. This has been most eloquently and tragically represented in the recent campaign and outcome of the 2024 presidential election and subsequent policies targeting the deportation of immigrant minorities.

Conversely, this Special Issue is also concerned with global resistance. It is worth noting that these old and new tactics of oppression have engendered new forms of resistance against racism, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, especially in Brazil and other nations of Latin America, as this Special Issue demonstrates. Amidst the current risks of a neo-McCarthyist resurgence, this Special Issue is also concerned with the representation of “subaltern” voices, a concept borrowed from Gayatri Spivak (2020). On the other hand, this understanding calls scholars to bring to the forefront the “periphery’s potency” as embodied in grassroots agency and the multiple forms of resistance emerging across movements from the global periphery (Escobar 2012; Alves 2020).

Guided by emerging scholarship, this Special Issue is organized into three sections. The first, “Potency of Periphery and Resistance”, invites readers to consider the emergence of subaltern struggles and resistance, and their limits and conflicts. The second, “Forms of Socioeconomic Injustices and Violence”, is focused on trends and phenomena that challenge or introduce new forms of socioeconomic and political vulnerability for minority groups in modern society. The third, “Immigration, Gender, and Human Rights”, addresses new patterns and trends in these areas, offering new insights into international and domestic immigration, often led by women, and race relations and immigration policies. In the following subsections, we provide a closer examination of each contribution.

1. Potency of Periphery and Resistance

The first paper in “Potency of Periphery and Resistance” is a contribution from Fernando L. Fernandes, Heloisa Melino, and Jailson de Souza e Silva, titled “In Defense of a Peripheral Epistemology: Exploring ‘Decolonial Cognitive Triggers’ for Epistemic Disobedience in Urban Peripheries.” Drawing on post-colonial literature, the authors introduce the concept of “peripheral epistemology” as an alternative to the epistemology of coloniality. Their empirical case study is the Brazilian urban periphery, the inspirational source for what they define as “epistemological disobedience” (p. 6). In the Western traditional cosmovision, the subaltern’s episteme is regarded as a synonym of primitivism and backwardness; however, according to Fernandez, Melino, and de Souza e Silva, the periphery is rich in new practices of survival and resistance to systemic racism. In contrast to the currently hegemonic neoliberal individualistic spirit emerging in the world, these authors document how the practices and knowledge of peripheral people carry tremendous potential based on the principles of solidarity and reciprocity.

The following paper by Sérgio Costa, Flavia Rios, and Fernando Baldraia, “Promises and Pitfalls of Intersectional Politics: The Black Coalition for Rights in Brazil,” examines institutional Afro-Brazilian resistance using the case of Brazil’s “Black Coalition for Rights,” established in 2019. This coalition was formed to enhance the coordination of interventions in this area and includes representatives from diverse ideological perspectives, united by a shared commitment to defending and promoting the rights of Afro-Brazilians. According to Costa, Rios, and Baldraia, “the [Black] Coalition [for Rights] represents a paradigmatic case” due to its unprecedented efforts “to negotiate divergences” (p. 1) within a political and institutional landscape increasingly dominated by far-right politicians, which culminated in the 2019 election of President Jair Bolsonaro. Against this backdrop, these authors document how the Black Coalition for Rights pioneered a strategic approach that addressed the growing threat to anti-racist policies (including policies for gender rights and the rights of LGBTQI+ groups) in Brazil’s legislative sphere over the last decade.

The following two papers address the implementation of recent higher education policies in Brazil and the challenges associated with their practical implementation. In “Affirmative Action Policies in Higher Education in Brazil: Outcomes and Future Challenges,” Rosana Heringer presents an extensive investigation that scrutinizes the impact of affirmative action in Brazil following the 2012 legislation that mandated federal universities to reserve fifty percent of undergraduate seats for applicants enrolled in public high schools, including slots for vulnerable students in families living below the low-income threshold and Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous minorities. The author emphasizes that while this policy has undeniably contributed to “democratizing access to public universities” (p. 18) and instigated changes in the “references, meanings, and priorities of universities, including research agendas, curricula, procedural modifications, and institutional cultures” (p. 18), it continues to face challenges due to inadequate funding, political resistance, and persistent institutional limitations. Additionally, the author finds that while most Brazilians believe it is the responsibility of entities and institutions focused on supporting students and promoting ethnic and racial equality to address these limitations, the solutions ultimately rest in the hands of higher-level administrative bodies. In the conclusion, the author proposes several mechanisms to help address these challenges, especially those that fall under the responsibility of higher education institutions.

In the final and interrelated paper of this section, “Law Programs, Ethno-Racial Relations Education, and Confronting Racism in the Brazilian Judiciary,” Sales A. dos Santos discusses the impact of the implementation of a Brazilian National Education Council resolution that made mandatory the teaching of ethnic/racial relations in law schools (referred to under the acronym ERER). Unlike the United States, in Brazil, higher education institutions begin to train future lawyers at the undergraduate level. Several studies have highlighted, however, the racially biased characteristics of the Brazilian judiciary authority, which not only recruits most judges, public prosecutors, general attorneys, and chief policy officers from the upper-middle-class strata, often white men, but also limits the legal rights of Afro-Brazilians, leaving them more vulnerable to severe forms of penalties, when they come into conflict with the legal system. In this context, dos Santos draws his reader’s attention to the ERER resolution as a mechanism that could contribute to reducing this inequality by shaping anti-racist ideologies among future legal practitioners during their initial training. Dos Santos’ findings, however, reveal minimal success in implementing the law, as the available national data show that out of forty-one law schools surveyed, 44% have not complied with the ERER resolution. Even among law schools that have done so, only twelve “created or included one or more classes in their curricula specifically covering the teaching of ERER, and just one school had hired faculty to teach that component” (p. 6).

2. Forms of Socioeconomic Injustice and Violence

The second part of this Special Issue addresses a worldwide trend toward increasing social inequality and the global rise in electoral support for right-wing politicians, such as Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, and other concerning examples in various parts of the world. In some sense, these parallel trends also attest to the already observed pattern of global Brazilization, as evoked in our opening remarks above and as illustrated in the first two papers of this section.

In “Angels at the Top, Rocks at the Bottom: Naturalized Inequality in Brazilian Conservative Thought,” Georg Wink explores the emergence and deepening of the far-right-wing repertoire in Brazil. From the perspective of the longue durée, he analyzes the multiple philosophical and political sources of authoritarianism in Brazil by compiling seldom-remembered references relating to “neo-Thomist interpretations of late-scholastic scholarship” (p. 1). He also emphasizes the importance of Getúlio Vargas’s New State regime in establishing the conditions for Brazil’s economic and institutional authoritarian modernization throughout much of the twentieth century. The crisis of the developmentalist model in the 1980s contributed further with a renewed liberal–conservative coalition, subsequent neoliberalism, and the shrinking scope of public policies from the 1990s onward, despite poverty relief actions such as the Programa Bolsa Família (a government cash-transfer program that now benefits about 20.6 million families). At the end of his contribution, Wink remarks that his “hypothesis for further research is that the racialized character of social inequality in Brazil may explain [its] resilience” (p. 11).

Focusing on the forms of counteractions that resist the symbolic violence caused by traditional media, Regina Castro McGowan, in “‘Whose Place of Speech?’ Brazil’s Afro- and Queer-Centric YouTube Channels and the Decentralization of TV Globo’s Telenovela Discourse,” studies the emergence of Queer-centric YouTube and TikTok channels as a form of counter-narrative. Referring to Djamila Ribeiro’s “place of speech” concept, McGowan identifies several millennial Afro-Brazilian and LGBTQIA+ peripheral content creators who “have understood the power of free access digital platforms for challenging controlled images of Afro-Brazilians” (p. 12). The author asserts that these creators regularly “[attract] subscribers by emphasizing content centered on negritude, gender politics, and place of speech” (p. 1) and rebuffing hypersexualized—and thus dehumanized—Afro-Brazilian bodies, thereby making clear to traditional media outlets the need for “deconstructing and de-normalizing Eurocentric and patriarchal controlling images” (p. 1).

Also engaging critically on false promises of financial inclusion, Danielle Santanna’s paper, “Providing Consumer Credit to Low-Income Populations in Brazil—The Case of Complexo da Penha,” shows that socioeconomically vulnerable communities in Brazil have limited access to formal credit due to different levels of vulnerabilities, such as a lack of the documentation needed to open a bank account, credit rationing, and discouragement based on exorbitant interest rates, including from formal financial institutions. Santana’s findings suggest that in the face of immediate or long-term loan needs, economically vulnerable clients often rely on family resources or informal credit mechanisms, particularly loan sharks. At the same time, the Brazilian government has recently initiated efforts to increase the coverage of the nation’s financial system, with mixed results. While these new government guidelines have enhanced financial inclusion for members of the nation’s lowest economic strata, these guidelines have also exposed consumers from these vulnerable groups to financial risks due to limited long-term relationships with financial institutions, the lack of financial education, and other social vulnerabilities due to these individuals’ unstable networks and concentration within informal work sectors. Overall, drawing on qualitative insights gathered among inhabitants of an informal settlement in Rio de Janeiro, Santanna concludes that macro-level debt dynamics and guidelines of inclusion have led to growing household indebtedness and an alarming frequency of Brazilians’ defaulting on loans.

Similarly, unprecedented results are documented in a paper informed by an investigation into the role now played by nonprofit organizations in reproducing power structures and inequality in Vancouver, Canada. This key contribution, “Situating the Nonprofit Industrial Complex” by Tyson S. Kelsall and collaborators, documents how the Nonprofit Industry Complex (NPIC) reproduces inequality in the community that its constituent institutions profess to serve. The findings reveal that NPIC evades accountability regarding health and social disparities while simultaneously influencing the revenue-generating objectives of nonprofits and diminishing their responsibility to safeguard the community. Therefore, according to the authors, even though nonprofits are funded by state funds to provide housing, health, and social services, they do not consistently deliver equitable services, thereby hindering potential societal transformation by perpetuating the established social order and power structure. The authors’ findings thus challenge the prevailing positive framing of nonprofits and charitable community organizations, suggesting that such a pattern of social policy management is, in fact, a mechanism through which the forces of neoliberal governance prevail. The paper also criticizes the amalgamation of the public and private sectors, identifying this process with the bureaucratization of social movements and caregiving work as a means of sustaining the existing social order and power distribution.

The following paper by Kaniya Triphathi and collaborators, “Social Determinants of Health in India: Reimagining of Dr. Ambedkar’s Vision in the Light of Marginalized Communities,” draws our global gaze to Asia, seeking to understand India’s historical approach to healthcare access as a human right. The paper considers Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, one of India’s independence leaders and a “chief architect” of its constitution (p. 2). In his capacity as a physician, he pioneered the concept of health protection access and a new understanding of how inequalities caused by poverty, caste, and gender limited access to healthcare and education in India, drawing on his personal experience of social mobility as an “economist by training, anthropologist, [and] sociologist” (p. 2) and as someone who experienced discrimination and exclusion within a “marginalized community” (p. 2). Grounding their argument upon national and international statistics on poverty and the state of the Indian health system—currently in crisis, with limited access among the most vulnerable groups—and articulating Ambedkar’s ideas anew, the authors propose the implementation of a universal healthcare system in India, emphasizing that “it is necessary to prioritize the equitable distribution of healthcare resources and increase government investment to at least 3% of GDP in healthcare services” (p. 9).

Closing this second section on new forms of socioeconomic injustice and violence is Alfredo Cuecuecha’s paper, “Do Segmented Assimilation Theory and Racialized Place Inequality Framework Help Explain Differences in Deaths due to COVID-19 Observed Among Hispanic Subgroups in New York City?” Cuecuecha draws on quantitative insights and the application of segmented assimilation and place stratification theories to explain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Hispanic groups, the most significant minority and one of the most historically disadvantaged groups in the United States. As the author argues, the COVID-19 pandemic created new forms of public health crisis and socioeconomic inequality among racial and ethnic minorities across the United States and worldwide. The case of Hispanic groups in the United States nonetheless challenges assumptions about the group’s homogeneity. This contribution presents new evidence of how that group’s plurality and differences in socioeconomic position and ethno-racial status (including skin color) increased the risk of death for some Hispanic subgroups more than for others due to groups’ asymmetric access to basic subsistence needs, including preventive healthcare and vulnerable immigration status, which prevented many from seeking and/or receiving public service and emergency support.

3. Immigration, Gender, and Human Rights

The third part of this Special Issue addresses new research on immigration, gender, and human rights, which, as commented above, is currently one of the most critical and complex topics for global societies.

In “Labor Force Participation of Central American Migrant Women in Mexico,” Carla Pederzini and Liliana Meza draw on Mexican national census data to compare the labor integration experiences of migrant women from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras residing in Mexico. Their empirical analysis allows them to propose some potential reasons why the “involvement of women in migration flows from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is observed to be on a decline” (p. 12), a trend identified by scholars as attributable to the increasing perils of international migration to Mexico, even when most of these women are accompanied by their partners. However, the findings reveal that, after statistical control, “migrant workers from Central America receive remuneration above the labor income of their Mexican counterparts” (p. 11). The analysis further reveals that the demographic profile of Central American migrant women in Mexico has changed over time, depending on the country of origin, as Salvadoran and Honduran females have higher levels of education than Guatemalans. The authors also find that the educational levels of migrant women from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in Mexico decreased between 2000 and 2020. They attribute this decline in human capital to shifts in the factors pushing such women to migrate, including forced migration following political persecution amid civil wars, increased socioeconomic inequality following peace agreements, economic changes, and increased state and public violence. Overall, the authors offer a new understanding of the determinants of women-led international migration, the forms of discrimination that impact the type and mode of work integration experienced by Central American women in Mexico, and how societal norms and expectations regarding women’s status, both in their countries of origin and their destination countries, may contribute to the distinct patterns of labor market participation and gendered inequality experienced by migrant men and women from Central America residing in Mexico.

In the next paper focused on the migration of women, “Highly Educated Women: Exploring Barriers and Strategies for Labour Integration in an Emotional Migratory Process,” Concepción M. Oñate, Maria Luisa Di Martino, and Iratxe Aristegui document the obstacles faced by highly educated immigrant women from Latin American finding jobs that match their high level of imported human capital in Spain’s Basque Country. Their research draws on qualitative insights focused on the experiences of Latin American women compared to those of European women married to Basque husbands. The authors conceptualize their respondents’ decisions to follow their partners and form new families, or raise children abroad, as part of an “emotional journey” (pp. 1, 16). While the barriers these women encountered were lower within “feminized” work sectors, such as healthcare and education, language hurdles, limited social networks, family responsibilities, traditional gender roles, and the transfer of cultural capital limited their integration. The researchers found that self-employment offered an alternative path for highly qualified immigrant women to achieve economic independence and flexibility in establishing small, market-driven businesses. Their results do not confirm, however, that all women face the same level of challenges or that self-employment is a guaranteed alternative for overcoming the sum of obstacles encountered by many women in Spain or the Basque Country, especially those who experience further exclusion due to their family structure—as single or coupled—in addition to their ethnic or racial identity or status.

Chinyere Osuji’s paper, “In Moving for Love: Interracial Marriage and Migration in Brazil,” addresses the nuanced discussion on race and intermarriage in Brazil, analyzing the effect of domestic migration on the likelihood of interracial marriage. The author frames her analysis using data from the Brazilian National Household Survey, the country’s primary annual dataset, which contains, among other variables, information on internal migration. While the racial democratic narrative that has historically been used to portray race relations in Brazil suggests a general openness to interracial marriage, successive studies have highlighted the significant role played by social class, status exchange, and skin color in determining interracial marriage. Overall, scholarship based on historical and sociological approaches demonstrates the asymmetric odds of interracial marriage for women of differing phenotypes and corresponding social positions (Azevedo 1996; Silva and Ribeiro 2009; Telles and Esteve 2019). In dialogue with these studies and after controlling for statistical factors, Osuji finds that “for white spouses, migration increased the odds of intermarriage for both husbands and wives” (p. 18). The author’s statistical analysis also suggests “a higher threshold to brown women intermarrying in comparison with their brown male counterparts” (p. 18). She also finds that for black wives and husbands, migration increases the odds of intermarriage. In Osuji’s words, however, “black spouses comprise a much smaller proportion of the population than either brown or white partners, so it is important not to overstate the findings in their case” (p. 19). Osuji’s findings expand the literature on interracial marriage and race relations in Brazil by introducing a new approach to the field of domestic migration and displacement. This study addresses the variations in the Brazilian population’s racial characteristics across different regions and territories and examines how human mobility influences the patterns and likelihood of interracial marriage for people who can cross spatial and social boundaries.

Finally, in an original research article, Mônica R. Schpun’s “Getúlio Vargas and the Making of Restrictive Migratory Policies in Post-1930 Brazil,” broadens the discussion on international migration using a historical framework to analyze the integration of Jewish people as Whites into the Brazilian society, despite their historical marginalization and persecution in Europe. The author examines the contradictory policies of the Brazilian “Estado Novo” dictatorship regarding Jewish and Asian immigrants to Brazil. Since the end of the monarchist regime (which lasted between 1822 and 1889), the Brazilian government has pursued a demographic policy aimed at promoting racial whitening to address the nation’s supposed backwardness and barbarism, which the elite associated (and possibly still associate) with the non-white population. This policy involved encouraging white European immigration while fostering a decline in Indigenous and African-descended populations through racial mixing and their anticipated disappearance due to “natural competition”. The collapse of the 1889–1930 oligarchic regime and the subsequent rise of Getúlio Vargas to power, however, led to a new orientation across various sectors of Brazilian society, including in ideologies regarding immigration and Jewish people. Reproducing Schpun’s words, this “does not mean that the local Jewish community was not under tension concerning the international context and not aware of the difficulties imposed by the Vargas regime” (p. 13). However, according to the author’s reasoning, while in other parts of the world, the Jewish population was subject to an irreducible anti-Semitism, in Brazil, where the “pattern of race relation” is based not on ancestry but on phenotype, “existing racial hierarchies brought Jews, particularly German Jews, closer to the privileged white fractions and was, in this sense, different from the group’s previous experiences of belonging, allegedly, to an ‘inferior race.’” (p. 12). Nonetheless, this compensatory mechanism did not equally benefit Asian migrants, who were “racially” stigmatized by their distinct phenotypes and perceived as unwilling to assimilate into the national political community.

Italo Calvino once stated that a “classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.” (Calvino 2009). Might this Special Issue fall into that category? Naturally, it does not. Unlike the classics that have inspired generations, academic papers often adhere to the limitations imposed by a maximum word count and an expectation of objectivity. What, then, could be the connection between the classics and this current volume? In these troubled times marked by intolerance, sexism, racial hatred, and xenophobia—disturbed further by the increasing far-right totalitarianism—, inspired by Calvino’s wisdom words, the co-editors of this Special Issue hope this publication will engender continued reflection on social justice and the role of the periphery in the creation of both alternative knowledge and new horizons for tolerance, human rights, and social justice.

In memoriam of Liliana Meza and Kristiano Raccanello**

** P.S. During the last phase of the publication of this Special Issue, the editors were informed of the sad loss of two potential contributors of two Latin American scholars in Mexico, Kristiano Raccanello, and Liliana Meza, a colleague and co-author of Carla Pederzini. While it is impossible to compensate for such a regrettable loss, we hope to honor their trajectories, legacies, and tremendous contributions to advancing social justice in the social sciences, as well as their academic engagement.