2,229 articles
Roger Hallam (activist)
Roger Hallam (Julian Roger Hallam) is the British activist who co-founded Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil; a former Welsh organic farmer and King's College London civil-disobedience researcher, he received a five-year prison sentence in July 2024 for the M25 gantry protest conspiracy, reduced to four years in March 2025.
Rohith Vemula (రోహిత్ చక్రవర్తి వేముల)
Rohith Vemula (రోహిత్ చక్రవర్తి వేముల), born 1989, was a Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad who died by suicide on 17 January 2016 after suspension and hostel expulsion following a dispute with ABVP students, sparking nationwide caste-discrimination protests.
Role
Role (social role): the expected behavior attached to a social position or status in sociology and social psychology. Also gender roles, role theory, social role theory (Eagly, Wood). Defined by Banton and Merton, learned via socialization, and measurably shaping labor-market outcomes.
Romance (love)
Romance (love) is the intense attraction to a specific preferred partner, studied scientifically as distinct from sex drive and attachment. Sources cover its neurochemistry, cross-cultural universality, measurement, and relationship outcomes.
Romance scam
Romance scam, also called romance fraud or pig butchering when investment-based: fraud using a fake online identity to build a romantic relationship and extract money; emerged around 2007-2008, with advance-fee and crypto-investment variants.
Romantic friendship
Romantic friendship: historically documented same-sex bonds, passionate, intense, and sometimes sexual, common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America; related to the Boston marriage and debated against lesbian identity categories.
Romantic orientation
Romantic orientation: enduring pattern of romantic attraction by partner gender, distinct from sexual orientation. Includes aromantic, biromantic, heteroromantic, panromantic labels; heavily documented in asexual and aromantic-spectrum community research.
Ronald McDonald House Charities
Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC), rebranded 2025 as Ronald McDonald House, is a global nonprofit founded in Philadelphia in 1974 that provides Houses, Family Rooms, and Care Mobiles for families of hospitalized children in 60+ countries, with McDonald's as founding partner.
Rōnōha
Rōnōha (労農派, "Labor-Farmer faction") was a group of Japanese Marxist theorists who, from the late 1920s, opposed the Japan Communist Party and the Kōza-ha in the Japan Capitalism Debate.
Roommate
Roommate: a person sharing living space with a non-family co-tenant, mainly to cut housing costs. Covers the economics of shared rents, college roommate matching, and the matching-theory roommate problem.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks (Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, 1913–2005), American civil rights activist whose December 1, 1955 refusal to yield her Montgomery bus seat sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended bus segregation via Browder v. Gayle.
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the Riveter, born from a 1942 Evans and Loeb song and tied to Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post cover and Miller's "We Can Do It!" Westinghouse poster, symbolizes American women war workers of World War II, later reclaimed as a feminist icon.
Rouhollah Zamzameh
Rouhollah Zamzameh, known as Rouhollah Zam (روحالله زم), Iranian dissident journalist and founder of the Telegram channel Amadnews; exiled in France, abducted from Iraq in 2019, executed by Iran on 12 December 2020.
Roy Jeffs
Roy Jeffs (Leroy Barlow Jeffs, 1992-2019), a son of FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, left the sect in February 2014 and publicly described his father's abuses before dying by suicide at age 26.
Royal intermarriage
Royal intermarriage, also known as dynastic marriage, is the practice of rulers marrying members of other ruling dynasties for political ends such as alliances, inheritances, and peace; it declined after World War I.
Rubén Díaz Sr.
Rubén Díaz Sr. (born 1943), Bronx Pentecostal minister and conservative Democrat; New York State Senator 2003–2017 and NYC Council member; led opposition to same-sex marriage and lost the 2020 NY-15 primary to Ritchie Torres.
Ruby Bridges
Ruby Bridges (Ruby Nell Bridges Hall), American civil rights activist who at age six desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960, escorted by federal marshals, later founding the Ruby Bridges Foundation.
Rula Daood
Rula Daood (רולא דאוד), born 1985 in Kafr Yasif, is a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel, former speech therapist, and national co-director of Standing Together with Alon-Lee Green since 2019; TIME100 Next 2024 honoree and 2026 co-founder of the A Place for Us All party.
Rules for Radicals
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Saul Alinsky's 1971 Random House book of thirteen rules for grassroots community organizing by the Have-Nots; his last book, influential on left organizers and Tea Party activists alike.
Rulon Jeffs
Rulon Timpson Jeffs (1909–2002), Mormon fundamentalist prophet who led the FLDS Church from 1986 until 2002; father and predecessor of Warren Jeffs, and centralizer who incorporated the sect and abolished its council.
Runaway (dependent)
Runaway (dependent): a minor in child welfare or foster care who leaves a state-supervised placement without permission. Covers prevalence, causes, justice-system and permanency risks, and US federal RHY program responses.
Russell Means
Russell Means (Oglala Lakota, 1939–2012), AIM leader who led the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, later an actor in The Last of the Mohicans and author of Where White Men Fear to Tread.
Rusty trombone
Rusty trombone: vulgar English sex slang for simultaneous anilingus and hand stimulation of a partner; also Dutch roestige trombone. Etymology combines trombone hand-mouth imagery with the rust-color of fecal matter; earliest print citation 2003.
Sabina Wurmbrand
Sabina Wurmbrand, born Sabina Oster, was a Romanian-born evangelist imprisoned under communism who co-founded The Voice of the Martyrs with her husband Richard and wrote The Pastor's Wife.
Sada Abe (阿部定)
Sada Abe (阿部定), Japanese geisha and prostitute who murdered and emasculated her lover Kichizō Ishida in May 1936, was sentenced to six years, and became an enduring icon of Japanese film, literature, and sexuality studies.
Sadie Hawkins Day
Sadie Hawkins Day, an invented holiday from Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip (first appearance November 15, 1937), in which Dogpatch women chase and marry bachelors; it spawned real girls-ask-boys Sadie Hawkins dances.
Sadomasochism
Sadomasochism combines sadism and masochism, terms coined by Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) after de Sade and Sacher-Masoch; consensual forms fall under BDSM, while ICD-11 recognizes only coercive sexual sadism disorder.
Safia Farkash
Safia Farkash (صفية فركاش), also Safia Farkash Al-Barassi, is the widow of Muammar Gaddafi, his second wife since 1970, mother of seven of his eight children, a UN-sanctioned individual from 2011, and majority shareholder of Buraq Air.
Saima Wazed
Saima Wazed (সায়মা ওয়াজেদ), Bangladeshi school psychologist and autism advocate, daughter of Sheikh Hasina; WHO South-East Asia Regional Director February 2024 to September 2026, ending in fraud allegations, leave, and resignation.
Sakiko Kanase (金勢さき子)
Sakiko Kanase (金勢さき子), also Saliku Maesaroh or Suō Sakiko, was a Japanese model and hostess who became Sukarno's companion or wife and died in Jakarta in 1959, weeks after Ratna Sari Dewi arrived; birth and death dates differ across sources.