Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements

Abstract

Abstract Students of social movements fought, and won, a lengthy battle to legitimate academic interest in the field. As the study of social movements is increasingly embraced by the academy, however, practitioners and scholars now face the challenge of using this hard-won legitimacy to afford the time and space to ask and answer important questions about collective action and social movements: How and why do movements emerge? Why do they take the forms they do? When and how do protest movements bring about meaningful social change? Alas, the exigencies of academic study often lead scholars to cultivate niches and burrow more deeply into narrow areas of inquiry, rather than return to the issues that gave rise to the study of social protest in the first place. The essays in this volume represent a concerted effort to build bridges among people researching collective action and social movements and to encourage the construction of comprehensive and synthetic approaches to the study of social movements. In this introductory essay, I mean to explain the need for bridge-building within this area of study and suggest ways to cross disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries, for none has a monopoly on useful knowledge on movements. The important things that have to happen in the study of social protest involve connecting what distinct groups of scholars do into a larger whole. The puzzles of social protest politics mandate a response from the academy that is inherently collective. Indeed, if substantial progress in the study of social movements is really to occur, it will come from a community of scholars that triangulates (cf. Tarrow 1995a) the problems described here, working on pieces of the problems.