Trayectorias de vida, trayectorias políticas: ejercicios situados de política encarnada

Southern social movements have played an important role in shaping world history and politics. Nevertheless, the global North has remained the major site of social movement analysis and theoretical production. Although the paradigms and theories which were developed by social movement theory in the North are partially applicable in the global South, these societies have remained little more than laboratories for testing the theories which were developed in the North. In other words, Southern movements have rarely been studied independent of Northern theory and much of their uniqueness and complexity has been overlooked. Hence, social movement theory fails to provide a thorough analysis of Southern movements because it does not situate them in the context of their own historical backgrounds, cultures, socio-economic and political structures. The reason that social movement theory and analysis has geographically remained limited to the North is obviously not because their movements are more significant. Indeed, in many instances social movements and struggles in the South are characterized by a much larger scale and function in much more challenging circumstances. As movements are reflections of particular processes in a country or a region, any systematic effort to renew our understanding of the complex processes involved in evolution of social movements in the South must reflect the complexity of these societies. The global South and the groundbreaking struggles of people in Southern countries are important not only because the majority of the world’s population resides in these countries, but because these societies and their movements have historically been an indissoluble and integral part of global modernity (Bringel and Domingues 2015). Thus, in order to understand the significance of Southern movements, they must be situated in political, cultural and social transformations of their own countries and regions as well as a wider social and historical background. Hence, it is necessary to take the Southern countries into account in ways that will lead to a new understanding and theorization of the world and global dynamics. Since its emergence as a scholarly field social movement studies has gone through different paradigm shifts between North Amer ican and European approaches (including collective behaviorism, heterodox Marxism, New Social Movement Theory, Resource Mobilization Theory and Political OpportunityStructures, etc.). By the 1990s the political opportunity approach called for fusing the US and European approaches of social movement studies. In Dynamics of Contention (2001) McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly launched a research program which shifted the paradigm of contentious politics from looking at causes and effects of movements to mechanisms and processes that happen in movements and lead to different results in different contexts. They also included case studies from different regions of the world in their research agenda. Although this approach had a more inclusive outlook and was applied in the South, as Bringel and Domingues (2015: 9) argued, “the extension of the comparison to non-Western areas has not always meant paying attention to the experiences and social practices of social actors of non-Western countries.” In sum, social movement studies remains Northern-centric because it does not focus on Southern movements on their own terms. What is urgently needed is a paradigm shift in the way that Southern movements are understood and researched. Many scholars have embraced transnational approaches since the 1990s, due to the emergence of highly visible social struggles on the international stage (e.g., the anti-/alter-globalization movement and other global justice struggles). These approaches focus on the emergence of heterogeneous groups of activists and diffusion of the local and the global. While the significance of the global-local nexus and the ever increasing scale of transnational movements remains important, we cannot deny the dominance of Northern social movements and organizations in these transnational networks and mobilizations. In many instances the issues and demands of Northern societies become the source of the so-called global solidarity (see Steady 2002; Thompson and Tapscott 2010). Examples of underrepresentation of the South in such transnational mobilizations can be seen in the dominance of “white feminism” in contrast to “postcolonial feminism” within the women’s movement, and the preeminence of “conservation issues” in contrast to “survival issues” in the environmental movement. This volume aims to engage with social movements by going beyond a conventional Northern genealogy. It aims to shift the focus on the North as center of theory building and social movement analysis to the South. Hence, on the one hand it brings into focus Southern movements, their history, culture and structures. On the other hand, it argues for systematic inclusion of these movements within social movement theory. Therefore, it seeks to generate a discussion among scholars of social movements by encouraging them not only to incorporate the struggles of people from the global South into theory and scientific approaches but also to embrace their realities as an inseparable part of world history and transformative global processes. This could encourage comparative analysis of Southern and Northern movements, which could ultimately open up the horizon of social movement theory and lead to the generation of theories which are truly global rather than simply Northern. In order to take a step towards these goals, this volume has brought together scholars researching a geographically diverse range of places which are often excluded from social movement studies. The cases cover a wide but not necessarily representative range of social movements in the South. However, they capture thediversity of the Southern movements, their complexity and their uniqueness, but also their similarities to the Northern movements. The original data presented from these countries not only enrich social movement scholarship but broaden the scope of social sciences in general. The chapters address diverse theoretical and empirical starting points. While some are more theoretical in nature, others emphasize empirical data and first-hand knowledge of under-researched movements. Combining the empirical cases with ongoing theoretical debates on social movements provides a basis for further developments and dialogue with the existing literature on movements in the global South. Moreover, it fosters a global dialogue in sociology in general and in social movement studies in particular.

Social media is being employed to build support for social, economic, and political justice (Selander et al. 2016; Vaast et al. 2014) in movements such as occupy Wall Street, violence against women's movement and global sustainability movement. These movements have used social media in ways that goes beyond simple communications. As social media allows people to produce and share user generated content, they enable a certain set of affordances of these technologies (Bharati et al 2015; Bharati et al 2014). The social media affordances, available to both collective and individual actors, translate into capabilities afforded to social movements (Tufecki 2014). Research on connective action has examined the effects of digital action repertoires on interaction and engagement such as in the Tea Party and Occupy movements (Agarwal et al. 2014; Selander et al. 2016). Social media can also facilitate mobilization of movement and participation by new volunteers and oftentimes provides a transnational character by diffusing actions beyond the virtual (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). Conversation, an essential part of social movements, shapes “social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants&x201D; (Tilly 2002, p. 122). In a personal interaction that involves repeated organized interactions between individuals, typically, leads to shared values and trust. The role of social media technologies in furthering this conversation has to be studied and its' influence on social movement ascertained. A few scholars have started to investigate social media affordances and capabilities, especially focused on discourse, during contentious collective action. Still the research has been limited to studying mechanisms of participation, development of a sense of collective identity, creation of community, and framing of political discourse (Farrell 2012; Garrett 2006). Social media data on social movements can involve impersonal “like&x201D; and “share&x201D; to more engaged conversations. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube offer a wide communicative and discourse reach in networks with text, image, audio, and video data. This social media based big data, consisting mostly of unstructured data, comes in the form of social media posts, digital pictures and videos. The symposium will discuss how formal organizational structures and practices might be integrated with social media capabilities to reinforce and enhance social movement organizations as leaders in social change movements. It will explore the characteristics of social media discourse and assess the dynamics of social movements and, subsequent, impact on real-world protests. The symposium will also demonstrate how discourse analysis can be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns. The panel symposium will focus on theoretical and methodological challenges of social media analytics, big data and social movements. Panelists will engage the audience in an interactive discussion on: 1) Theoretical challenges: a. How and why are social movement recruitment and engagement mechanisms being impacted as a result of social media? b. How do we advance theory on social media and social movements when we are overwhelmed with social media based big data? c. What approach should we undertake if big data analysis contradicts most theories on social media and social movements? d. How do we address the issue of generalizability of social media and social movement research when data collection was limited to one social media platform, albeit involving big data? 2) Methodological challenges: a. What methodological approaches have worked in the analysis of social media, big data and social movements? b. How can discourse analysis be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns evident in social media-based big data? c. How can we employ social media analytics to investigate image and video data? d. What combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodologies be employed for big data and social media analytics in the context of social movements? e. What are the limitations of quantitative data analysis techniques, such as structural equation modeling, because of an extremely large sample size? f. What are the limitations of qualitative data analysis techniques as they become extremely labor intensive and, maybe even, impractical because of big data?

Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 290 pp.The Geographies of Social is an ambitious project that seeks to use ethnography to bridge political and cultural geography with social movements studies. More specifically, Ulrich Oslender deploys critical place (17) and rich ethnographic fieldwork to analyze the social movement(s) of black communities in Colombia's Pacific Coast region. For Oslender, this means focusing first on the situated cultural, physical, and social fabric of everyday life in these communities, before then tracing the diverse ways that these everyday realities get translated into social movement discourse, practice, and ideals. As a geographer, Oslender's emphasis is on understanding the ways that black communities in Colombia's Pacific Coast articulate their understandings of territory, collective rights, and the logic underlying them. What ensues is not a detached account of Colombian geography, but rather an ambitious ethnography grounded in place and space-one that is even poetic at times.Ulrich Oslender argues that social movement scholars need to go beyond analyzing generic processes and mechanisms (5) of movements and instead account for the dynamics of place-making and the assemblages of spatial relations that occur through human and non-human (in this case, aquatic) entanglements, which he captures through his concept of This shift away from purely structural accounts of movements is of course nothing new (i.e., New Social Theory), and his focus on the geographical constitution of social movement agency (13) draws on the work of geographers like Paul Routledge (1993), Steven Pile and Michael Keith (1997) who also demanded that space and place matter in social movements research. Where Oslender truly makes a unique contribution to the literature on social movements is through his concept of aquatic space. This concept allows him to fuse an attention to space with a multi-scalar examination of the situated physical, cultural, and political contexts of everyday life while paying serious attention to the narratives people have about space. Oslender takes this as the foundation for his analysis of social movement agency.The Geographies of Social begins with an introduction to the study and manuscript, as well as a brief primer on the relevant scholarship on place and social movements. The author goes on in Chapter 1 to outline his critical place perspective by reviewing the literature, which he groups as follows: Lefebvre and the Production of Space, which following Lefebvre's (1991) theory of the social production of space is broken up into the conceptual categories of Spatial Practices, Representations of Space, and Representational Space. This section is followed by A Critical Place Perspective on Social Movements where Oslender engages the work of geographers like Doreen Massey (2005) and David Harvey (1985) to argue, convincingly, for the need to account for the relationship between space and place, in order to render the multi-scalar, grounded, and networked experiences of communities and social movements legible. What I found to be missing, however, is an explicit engagement with the literature produced by anthropologists on social movements, space, and place. I found this surprising given the book's attempt to examine social movements ethnographically. For example, I would have liked to see the author relate Arturo Escobar's (2008) use of the notion of meshwork to his own concept of I think there may be a productive engagement there, especially given Escobar's similar interest in examining territories, difference, and social movements through theories of assemblage and his vast experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork with Afro-Colombian communities in the very same region. …

In the earlv 1980s many social theorists claimed that the 'New Social Move ments' (NSMs) were the authentic social movements of our time This claim is discussed in relation to two traditions in the analysis of social movements. The 'American' tradition focuses on the single-issue movement of a protest and mobilizing character The 'European' tradition focuses on the relation between major societal changes and processes of class formation, the labour movement being the classic case. In the article the women's movement is discussed as a major cultural revolutionary movement, the different campaigns dealing with the new urban forms of socialized reproduction, housing, planning, etc , as movements for the defence of the 'real consumption', the green and environmentalist movements taking up the conflicting relation nature-society Is the relation between the NSMs and the new and growing social strata of students and employees within the welfare state, which make up their audience and activist core, to be understood as a parallel to the part played by the 'old' social movements in the making of the working class, the farmer class, etc? It is argued that there is no 'necessary' relationship between the societal changes and the NSMs, as there was between industrialization and the labour movement. The societal relations and changes around which the NSMs organize themselves - gender contradictions, socialization of reproduction, con tradictions in the forms of modern urban living, nature society - do not single out a new social force as their 'natural' counterpart. They are both more encompassing in their reach and more non-partisan in character. The most likely centre for a possible coalescence of a multitude of NSMs into a major social movement, if not in the class formative sense, is the societally basic relationship, nature-society The themes and issues raised by the NSMs can in the political process become articulated with existing political and social forces. The capacity of these forces and institutions to absorb the issues raised by the NSMs deter mine the possibility for the NSMs to emerge as a new major social force.

Peter Dwyer & Leo Zeilig African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence, Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2012; 260 pp: 9781608461202, $17 (pbk) Peter Dwyer (Ruskin College) and Leo Zeilig (Institute of Commonwealth Studies) present a history and analysis of social movements in African history. They argue that most survey texts in African studies neglect the role of grassroots social movements, tending instead to portray Africa from the perspective of political and economic elites, whether imperialist or anti-imperialist. The result is that politics is reduced to issues of 'governance', and social movements are conflated with 'civil society' (p. 4). Therefore, Dwyer and Zeilig contend that 'social movements--popular movements of the working class, the poor, and other oppressed and marginalised sections of African society--have played a central role in shaping Africa's contemporary history' (p. 1). The authors define social movements as less institutional than 'civil society' or 'interest groups', which tend to address conflicts within existing political frameworks. They argue that social movements can take an institutionalised shape, but that they are often amorphous so to coalesce briefly around a particular issue or initiative before dissolving into wider society' (p. 23). Dwyer and Zeilig therefore make sharp distinctions between subaltern, 'grassroots' movements and predominately urban and donor-dependent NGOs. The latter are often entrenched in the political mainstream and therefore unable to enact meaningful social and economic change. This is not to say that Dwyer and Zeilig discount any usefulness of mainstream NGOs; they merely argue that 'independently minded civil society activists [must] break free of donor dependency and adopt a more critical attitude to the governments they had (in part) helped bring to power (p. 130). This means engagement with grassroots organisations and trade unions. Based on this framework, they present a post-1940s history of Africa divided into three cycles of protest'. First, the post-Second World War movements for independence leading up to the mid-1960s, when most African states achieved political independence. Second, the responses to the first wave of structural adjustment programmes in the late 1970s. Third, the merging of economic grievances with demands for democratic reform in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dwyer and Zeilig acknowledge some of the limitations of 1950s and 1960s African nationalism, noting the role of the educated elite in solidifying state control and 'suffocating' independent working-class politics (p. …

This chapter discusses Durkheim’s contribution to the theorization of social movements. The dominant Durkheimian approaches to social movements have been social disintegration approaches, on the one hand, and collective effervescence and ritual life-inspired analyses, on the other. This chapter suggests that there are other openings in Durkheim’s works as well that can be made productive for social movement theorizing, such as his sociology of morality as developed in Moral Education. It is argued that a distinctly Durkheimian understanding of social movements will entail an understanding of social movements as essentially moral phenomena. The chapter concludes that Durkheim’s reflections on morality in Moral Education allow for a theoretical perspective which is able to reconcile structure and agency, encompass a parallel focus on conflict and consensus, and allow for the theorization of emotional intensity as well as moral reflexivity in the analysis of social movements’ struggle for social change.

■ This article highlights the intellectual contributions of Karen Brodkin in the analysis of gender and social movements through drawing on some of her key concepts and ideas, joining them with others, and applying them to the specific analysis of the pluralistic social movement in Oaxaca which emerged in 2006 and continues to this day. The article’s theoretical inquiry centers on two primary questions that are followed by specific concepts explored in the analysis of the Oaxaca social movement. 1. How does collective action operate in daily life through interlinked networks? What are the leadership styles and models that may be unique to women? (center women, interlinked activist networks, meshworks, and the values and ties of daily life) 2. How do individual and collective political identities develop, shape the politics of particular social movements, and participate in performing ideological work that shifts public political discourses and perceptions? (individual and collective identity development, public political ideologies, and political presence).

By drawing upon concepts from Ulrich Beck’s work on risk, reflexivity, contestation, and subpolitical power, this article produces an understanding of social movement−based critiques of surveillance and argues for the promise of Beckian (conceptual) approaches in analyses of social movements’ power. While Beck argued, in his final book, that intensified surveillance constitutes a new epoch of the ‘risk society’, characterized by global digital freedom risks , little attention has been paid to how social movements contest such risks in ‘risk societies’. Responding to calls for research on these risks’ social consequences, thus filling this lacuna, this article advances our knowledge on Beck’s social theory and surveillance-related critiques by using the empirical example of football supporter movements and their surveillance-related contestations. As argued, this case example reveals civil society, movement field coalitions, and digital freedom risks’ emancipatory potential but historical significance.

Since the 1980s, sociologists examining social movements have largely agreed that culture, or the symbolic and expressive aspects of social life, matters in understanding social movements. Despite this, we often mean very different things when we talk about culture in our analyses of social movements. To help clarify some of the discrepancies, I present a typology of three prominent ways that scholars have understood culture as shaping collective action. These ways are as follows: (i) by rendering particular sites fruitful for social movements to mobilize out of; (ii) by serving as resources that assist in movement action; and (iii) by providing wider contexts that shape movement activity. These analytical building blocks help us to examine what we understand culture as “doing” in our work. Below, I present a number of useful books and articles that demonstrate thoughtful takes on culture and social movements, along with several other resources useful for teaching a class on collective action and social movements.

At times of global unrest and the emergence of a wide range of protest movements, recent intra-disciplinary criminological debates on the potentials and limits of resistance suggest a paradoxical trend. Critical criminologists—in particular, those associated with the ultra-realist perspective—have become increasingly skeptical of the idea of “resistance,” itself. In the context of these discussions, scholars have resorted to dismissing oppositional activities—including social movements and their different forms of protest—that are both intended and recognized as resistance. In my contribution to this debate, and in response to Jeff Ferrell’s (2019) article, “In Defense of Resistance,” I provide a critical reflection on the analysis of social movements in both ultra-realist and cultural criminological scholarship. Drawing from my ethnographic research with the (post-)Occupy movement in the United States, I argue that the dismissive reading of social movements’ resistance and the calls for stronger political leadership are the result of a narrow analytical lens applied to movements, their temporalities, and their historical context(s). In addition, I contend that the harsh criticism of social movements by ultra-realists connects to the aim of developing an intellectual leadership concerned with informing social movement practice and strategy “from above.” Here, as I maintain, the theory and practice of militant research, or militancia de investigación, as per the Colectivo Situaciones, challenges this understanding of intellectual leadership. The insights provided by radical collective knowledge production in social movements, and their critique of the institutional frameworks of the neoliberal university, allow for a critical reflection on the role of academia in resistance. This critical reflection can generate possibilities for social movements’ knowledge and radical imaginations to influence academic theorizing.

In the early 1980s many social theorists claimed that the ‘New Social Move­ments’ (NSMs) were the authentic social movements of our time. This claim is discussed in relation to two traditions in the analysis of social movements. The ‘American’ tradition focuses on the single-issue movement of a protest and mobilizing character. The ‘European’ tradition focuses on the relation between major societal changes and processes of class formation, the labour movement being the classic case. In the article the women’s movement is discussed as a major cultural revolutionary movement, the different campaigns dealing with the new urban forms of socialized reproduction, housing, planning, etc., as movements for the defence of the ‘real consumption'; the green and environmentalist movements taking up the conflicting relation nature-society. Is the relation between the NSMs and the new and growing social strata of students, and employees within the welfare state, which make up their audience and activist core, to be understood as a parallel to the part played by the ‘old’ social movements in the making of the working class, the farmer class, etc? It is argued that there is no ‘necessary’ relationship between the societal changes and the NSMs, as there was between industrialization and the labour movement. The societal relations and changes around which the NSMs organize themselves - gender contradictions, socialization of reproduction, con­tradictions in the forms of modern urban living, nature society - do not single out a new social force as their ‘natural’ counterpart. They are both more encompassing in their reach and more non-partisan in character. The most likely centre for a possible coalescence of a multitude of NSMs into a major social movement, if not in the class formative sense, is the societally basic relationship, nature-society. The themes and issues raised by the NSMs can in the political process become articulated with existing political and social forces. The capacity of these forces and institutions to absorb the issues raised by the NSMs deter­mines the possibility for the NSMs to emerge as a new major social force.

In this chapter, the author explores ways in which Marxism might contribute to the study of social movements through an engagement with some of the work of the British Marxist historians. In his critique of overly simplistic attempts to contrast old and new social movements, Craig Calhoun refers to the continuity between research into new social movements (NSMs) and Thompson’s analysis of social movements in his classic The Making of the English Working Class . The chapter effectively extends this insight to explore a living tradition of Marxist historiography that breaks down the dichotomy between old and new movements. It coheres with the work of those Marxist students of social movements who have suggested that the seeming decline of working-class radicalism and the rise of identity politics need not confound a sophisticated, humanist and, consequently, ethical interpretation of Marxism. Keywords:British Marxist Historians; British Marxist historiography; language; politics; social movements

Preface to the second edition. 1. The Study of Social Movements: Recurring Questions, (Partially) Changing Answers. 1.1. Four Core Questions for Social Movement Analysis. 1.1.1. Is social change creating the conditions for the emergence of new movements? 1.1.2. How do we define issues as worthy objects, and actors as worthy subjects of collective action? 1.1.3. How is collective action possible? 1.1.4. What determines the forms and intensity of collective action? 1.1.5. Are these questions specific of social movement analysis? 1.2. What is Distinctive of Social Movements? 1.2.1. The concept of social movement. 1.2.2. Conflictual and consensual collective action. 1.2.3. Social movements, events, and coalitions. 1.2.4. Social movements and organizational processes. 1.2.5. Social movements and protest. 1.3. On This Book. 2. Social Changes and Social Movements. 2.1 Social Structure, Political Cleavages and Collective Action. 2.1.1 Economic change, social fragmentation and movements. 2.1.2. Economic globalization and social conflict. 2.2 States, markets, and social movements. 2.2.1. Territorial boundaries and social conflicts: the transnationalization of protest. 2.2.2. State and classes: the conflicts around the welfare state. 2.3 Knowledge, Culture and Conflicts. 2.3.1. Shifting boundaries between the public and the private: 2.3.2. Cultures and countercultures. 2.3.3. Between the global and the local. 2.4. Structural Transformations, New Conflicts, New Classes. 2.4.1. Still classes? 2.4.2. New middle classes for new social movements? 2.5 Summary. 3. The Symbolic Dimension of Collective Action. 3.1. Culture and Action: The Role of Values. 3.2. Culture and Action: The Cognitive Perspective. 3.2.1. Collective action as cognitive praxis. 3.2.2. Interpretative frames and ideology. 3.2.3. Sense making activities: linking values and frames. 3.3. Problems and Responses. 3.4. Summary. 4. Collective Action and Identity. 4.1 How Does Identity Work? 4.2 Multiple Identities. 4.3 Does Identity Facilitate Participation? 4.4 How Is Identity Generated and Reproduced? 4.4.1 Self- and hetero-definitions of identity. 4.4.2 Production of identity: symbols, practices, rituals. 4.4.3 Identity and the political process. 4.5 Summary. 5. Individuals, networks, and participation. 5.1. Why do People Get Involved in Collective Action? The Role of Networks. 5.2. Do Networks Always Matter? 5.3. Individuals and Organizations. 5.3.1 Exclusive affiliations. 5.3.2. Multiple affiliations. 5.4. Individual participation, movement subcultures, and virtual networks. 5.5 Summary. 6. Social Movements and Organizations. 6.1. Organizational Dilemmas in Social Movements. 6.1.1. Mobilizing people or resources? 6.1.2. Hierarchical or horizontal structures? 6.1.3. Challengers or 'service providers'? 6.2. Types of social movement organizations. 6.2.1. Professional movement organizations. 6.2.2. Participatory movement organizations. 6.3. How do social movement organizations change? 6.3.1. Patterns of change. 6.3.2. Institutional factors and organizational change. 6.3.3. Organizational cultures and organizational change. 6.3.4. Modernization, technological innovation, and organizational change. 6.4. From movement organizations to social movement networks. 6.5 Summary. 7. Action Forms, Repertoires and Cycles of Protest. 7.1 Protest: A Definition. 7.2 Repertoires of Action. 7.3. The Logics and Forms of Protest. 7.3.1 The logic of numbers. 7.3.2 The logic of damage. 7.3.3 The logic of bearing witness. 7.4 Strategic Options and Protest. 7.5 Factors Influencing Repertoire Choice. 7.6 The Cross-national Diffusion of Protest. 7.7. Cycles of Protest, Protest Wave and Protest Campaigns. 7.8. Summary. 8. The Policing of Protest and Political Opportunities for Social Movements. 8.1 The Policing of Protest. 8.2. Political Institutions and Social Movements. 8.3. Prevailing Strategies and Social Movements. 8.4. Allies, Opponents and Social Movements. 8.4.1. Social movements in a multiorganizational field. 8.4.2. Social movements and parties. 8.5. Discursive Opportunity and the Media System. 8.5.1. Discursive opportunities. 8.5.2. Media and movements. 8.6 Summary. 9. Social Movements and Democracy. 9.1 Social Movement Strategies and Their Effects. 9.2 Changes in Public Policy. 9.3 Social Movements and Procedural Changes. 9.4. Social Movement and Democratic Theory. 9.5. Social movements and democratization. 9.6 Summary. References. Index.

The meaning of contentious collective action has itself always been open to contention. This is true not only of the historiography of revolutions, for example, but also of social science analyses of other, arguably less extreme, forms of contemporary 'contestation'. While up to the 1960s studies of collective action in Europe focused largely on the labour movement, since then much attention has also been paid to 'new' social movements. This article examines some of the methodological and ideological considerations which have shaped the analysis of social movements in France and influenced the debate in recent years as to their significance.

This contribution is focused on collective and individual stories of precarity in Italy. At the present time, when work and the imaginaries socially constructed around it are more and more individualised and fragmented, imaginaries and collective references – whether they be social movements, trade unions or professional groups – have given way to ever more particularistic and singular experiences, which hinder the construction of a coherent identity for workers. In this scenario the question to be asked is then: how is it possible to elaborate a new collective imaginary of precarity and reclaim new rights? After a focus on the phenomenon of precarity in Italy, this contribution move to consider the activities of the network of San Precario, a cultural phenomenon that managed to develop new kinds of social claims based on bottom-up and horizontal practices. It is then discussed that the current return to an almost exclusively individual approach to the question of precarity, which forces subjects to bear the management of their professional life trajectories. Finally, an analysis of social movements' recent efforts of self-organisation and some reflections on the possible role of social sciences in elaborating tools for planning a renewed welfare system are offered.