Social Movement Studies Research Articles

How Populists Rally Around the People: Evidence from the Yellow Vests Movement Using an Embedding Regression Model

AbstractThis research bridges populism and populist social movement studies to address the question of how left‐ and right‐wing populists unite in a common social movement. Using the novel “à la carte” (ALC) embedding regression model, it analyzes a unique dataset of 5,342 protesters and supporters from the Yellow Vests movement in France, capturing their understandings of the People from responses to open‐ended questions. Findings reveal that while left‐ and right‐wing populists diverge in their understandings of the People, differences are not politically divisive and do not preclude common vocabularies allowing for identification with the movement. This study contributes to the literature by showcasing the innovative application of the embedding regression method to textual data collected during social movements. Whereas research on the subject is predominantly qualitative, this study employs quantitative techniques to demonstrate that identification with the People fosters a unified movement despite divergent political beliefs and contrasting social identity frames.

The inner struggle: Co‐optation and moral authenticity within social movements scholarship

AbstractThe concept of co‐optation, denoting the appropriation of actors and ideas to support unintended agendas, has been widely employed in social movements studies. Despite its prominence, some scholars argue that the concept introduces ambiguous discussions of authenticity that morally judge activists under categories that are disconnected from their experiences of political participation. Consequently, they choose to separate morality from politics. I propose a meaningful approach to engage with morality and authenticity that contributes to the current understanding of the implications of co‐optation on movements and activists. First, I illustrate that moral concepts and attributions of responsibility are inherent to how activists experience co‐optation. Next, I highlight the limitations of existing theories of authenticity in capturing these moral elements. I then introduce the concept of moral authenticity, which refers to the importance that individuals place on acting in accordance with the type of person they aspire to be. I argue that integrating this notion with co‐optation offers a robust framework for describing and evaluating what authenticity means in the context of movements. This framework offers new insights into the relationship between individuals' personal lives and activism, an emerging field of inquiry in social movement scholarship.

Emotion and white-power music

ABSTRACT This article explores the variable of emotion in the context of white-power music. First, it outlines and builds upon approaches to emotion offered through the lens of Social Movement Studies (SMS). After presenting a short overview of white-power music, the article then analyses emotion within the lyrics and musical-sonic elements of white-power movement music. Such analysis supports the idea that this distinct cultural form represents a dynamic amplifier to many of the emotion-based drivers that scholars suggest unfold in radicalization, such as social bonding and identity formation, quest for significance, and empowerment. The music of white-power, specifically racist skinhead bands, offers an insightful case study for elaborating upon the role of emotion within the broader field of extremism studies.

Towards a Processual Social Movement Theory: Diachrony, Dialectics, and Danda

Interest in temporality and the effects of social movements over periods of time has increased over the past few years. This has created the need for diachronic approaches to the study of movements and accounts for how movements create social change and have an impact on the course of history. There have been some struggles to account for history in existing approaches to social movements, with eventful or ruptural accounts of social change remaining prominent in some recent works. This article proposes a conversational philosophy between African philosophies such as ubuntu and ibuanyidanda and Marxist humanism as an approach that can allow us to explore dynamic ontologies. Marxist approaches to social movement studies have so far yielded the most dynamic approaches to social change. I contend that ubuntu and ibuanyidanda offer ontological perspectives that allow us to understand humans and the societies they create as dynamic, changing, and interrelated, in a way that can complement, and enhance, the historical materialist model of a society created by collective human agency, albeit not in circumstances that they choose.

After the Storm: Comparing the Determinants of Young People’s Protest Behaviour Across South European Contexts

Young people’s mass mobilisation has been key for restructuring political competition in Southern Europe in the last decade. From a comparative standpoint, this article examines the drivers of protest in Greece, Italy, and Spain. The main results point towards a strong heterogeneity among the three cases: while women and people with left-libertarian attitudes form the basis of youth-driven contemporary street protest in Spain, these findings are partially confirmed for Italy and ruled out for Greece. We argue that protest legacies and trajectories need to go together with politicisation and issue salience to get individual-level correlates of protest activated—however, our mixed empirical evidence suggests that some context-specific conditions intervene in this relationship. Our results point towards a strong heterogeneity in the profile of protesters, inviting us to question the use of Southern Europe as a valid unit of analysis for the study of contemporary social movements and protests.

Research on political participation in contemporary Albania – an overview

ABSTRACT This article takes stock of research on political participation and civic engagement in Albania, a country generally perceived as lacking a civil society and a democratic political culture. Rather, Albanian political culture since the 1990s has been characterized by political conflict and a dysfunctional parliamentary life. On top of this comes widespread public dissatisfaction and a general lack of interest in politics. The general assumption is that a democratic political culture remains to be developed. Reviewing articles on public engagement in English-language journals and reports published in the recent decade, the overall picture is that research on Albanian political participation is poorly developed. There is a considerable amount of research and NGO reports dealing with formal political activity (electoral participation and party membership) and – in particular – studies of social movements, including protests and demonstrations. Other forms of participation are largely overlooked, like political consumption, social involvement, and civic engagement.

We need a global language rights movement: confronting the global language crisis with insights from social movement studies

Since the late 1980s, academics and activists have been drawing attention to a slow-moving global crisis: the ongoing destruction of global linguistic diversity. Despite this attention, language loss has proceeded unabated, and conservative estimates now suggest that around half the world’s languages will no longer be in use by the end of this century. In this provocation, I argue that only a global mass movement has the capacity to change the course of this crisis. I furthermore argue that a rights-based approach, centred on language rights, is our best bet for organising such a movement. Drawing on social movement studies, and my own experience as a language rights researcher and advocate, I explore three key areas where language rights provide the foundations for a mass movement in defence of linguistic diversity. First, I look at how language rights provide a discursive frame that resonates with other movements and clarifies the problem that needs to be addressed. Second, I look at how the concept of language rights can help recruit individuals and organisations into a mass movement and sustain their involvement in the cause. Third, I discuss how language rights provide a basis for effective collective action. In the conclusion I briefly discuss some of the challenges that will need to be overcome in forming a global mass movement for language rights.

Differential Modes of Mobilization: Building a National Chinese LGBTQ Movement with the Family

Combining the differential mode of association theory with social movement studies of families, I develop the concept, differential modes of mobilization, to understand how the state and family influence LGBTQ rights. Using in-depth qualitative research on two Chinese LGBTQ organizations, my empirical analysis shows that Common Language and PFLAG–China (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in China) anchor their visions of social change for LGBTQ people to differential mobilizing processes. Common Language connects key social sectors to LGBTQ issues, integrating LGBTQ rights into the state-recognized, family-centered “gender equality” framework. Strategizing around filial piety norms, PFLAG–China anchors its strategy in sequenced changes from the personal level to the entire society, accompanying LGBTQ people and their families as they work on self-acceptance and becoming agents of social change.

Learning, sharing and caring: Pedagogical features of parents’ educational activism

Scholars of social movements have afforded increasing attention in recent years to pedagogical processes and practices within activist organisations. This article contributes to the ‘pedagogical turn’ in social movement studies by exploring pedagogical features of parents’ educational activism. Drawing on qualitative data collected from parent-led campaign groups operating in England, UK, the article attends to three aspects of activist pedagogy evident within the campaigns. The first concerns the learning that occurs through engaging in activism. The second, internal and external processes of knowledge-sharing. And third, parents’ perceptions of the educative potential of activism as a means for imparting democratic values to their children. I argue that the pedagogical dimension is a central feature of parents’ activism. Indeed, such activism constitutes itself a form of civic education in which democratic values and ideals are transmitted from one generation to another.

Showing climate action: exploring Fridays for Future Germany’s visual activism on Flickr

This article examines how Fridays for Future Germany (FFFG) uses photographs of climate protests to convey the politics of climate change to wider audiences. The author argues that FFFG is an ideal-type form of visual activism in which visual imagery is central to its climate activism. The article builds on climate change communication scholarship and visual social movement studies to contribute an inquiry about FFFG’s visual activism. The focus is on FFFG’s visual self-representations on the social media platform Flickr, which promises to give insights into its strategies of self-legitimation. The empirical analysis discusses the recurring visual patterns in FFFG’s visual activism based on illustrative examples and provides an interpretive reading about the implications of certain ways of seeing and showing climate action. The conclusion puts the findings in a wider political context, highlighting the importance of visualization in the (self-)legitimation of FFFG in debates about global climate governance.

Social Movements and Policy Entrenchment

A vast scholarship shows that social movements can play pivotal roles in bringing about policies that benefit marginalized groups. However, the role of social movements in entrenching those policies—ensuring they take root—remains insufficiently studied. We set a research agenda for the study of how social movements shape policy entrenchment by calling attention to three commonly used strategies—occupying state bureaucracies, engaging in pressure and persuasion tactics, and building alliances with political parties—and analyzing the relationships among them. We illustrate these strategies through short case studies of social movements that achieved significant change benefitting marginalized groups in Latin America: the health movement in Brazil, the unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina, and peasant and indigenous movements in Bolivia.

Powermapping “Stop Cop City”: abolition ecology for possibilities beyond enclosure

ABSTRACT This essay brings the analytic of abolition ecology into conversation with the critical rhetorical study of social movements, to emphasize the ecological dimensions of racialized violence, settler colonialism, and abolitionist liberation struggles. We do so by advancing the method of rhetorical powermapping, as one way to constellate the rhetorical labor of activists/protectors as they unearth the depth and textures of power temporally and spatially. Putting rhetorical powermapping into practice, we follow the contours of recent insurgent movements to “Stop Cop City” as they unsettle power from within the urban forests of Atlanta, Georgia to broader national and global regimes. Such a practice emphasizes the need for multi-scalar and multi-species systems thinking in any vision of an abolitionist future. Stop Cop City insists we contend more deeply with the ecological dimensions of violence and the indispensability of life amid climate chaos, global militarism, and racialized and gendered repression. It also demands, we argue, that rhetorical scholars adopt alternative methods and analytics to make sense of emerging, decentralized movements on their own terms, the histories and relations that ground them, and the human and more-than-human solidarities they require.

Entangled social movements: extractivism and water justice in El Salvador

ABSTRACT El Salvador’s 2017 national metal mining ban and contentious 2021 water law seemingly represent distinct cases of social movement victory and failure. However, this study deploys relational methodologies to examine how El Salvador’s anti-metal mining and water justice movements emerged together, became partially separated, and remained thoroughly entangled. The concept of social movement entanglement builds on and extends dominant notions of relationality in social movement studies by emphasizing processes of intra-relation, mutual constitution and becoming-with. Rather than study how separate movements interact, investigating entanglement highlights how social movements become separated and remain entangled through acts of material and discursive politics. Examining the entangled origins, mobilizations, and outcomes of El Salvador’s anti-metal mining and water justice movements shows how these movements were neither the same nor distinct. Salvadorans bearing the brunt of water injustices lived these movements as one struggle. However, to pass the historic metal mining ban required anti-mining activists to distance their social movement goals and discourses from the more politically contentious and legally complex water law. Vitally, the strategic separation of these movements led to their further entanglement, as the historic ban informed, reinforced, and legitimized transformations within the water justice movement. From their origins to their evolving presents, El Salvador’s water and mining politics have remained entangled. Such entanglements implicate social movement theory, methodology and praxis in El Salvador and beyond and center the power-relations that shape what counts as social movement success and failure, and whose interests and environments are worth fighting for.

Visual Analysis and the Contentious Politics of the Radical Right

ABSTRACTAlthough images are very important for political actors and social movements, including the radical right (RR), empirical studies still rarely integrate visual material as relevant data for understanding radical right politics. This article outlines this new and growing field of research (i.e., visuality and the RR), critically reviewing existing studies from the perspective of both visual studies of social movements and contentious politics, which are rarely applied to the RR, and the methodology of working with images, offering empirical case studies (European and beyond) to illustrate the argument. The findings reveal the main functions of the use of visuals for the radical right, as well as the benefits (but also the challenges) of studying radical right politics through the lens of visual analysis. A conceptual framework is proposed to capture this dominant visual politics of the radical right. As shown, two dimensions emerge as the most theoretically relevant for the radical right: The discursive meaning of images (the story itself, telling the story, eliciting the story) and the communicative function of images (visual expression by the movement or others, visibility), which combine agency and addressee.

Attention, shocks, and relevance judgements: the case of white nationalism in the U.S. South, 1980–2008

ABSTRACT Why do white nationalist organizations (WNOs) focus attention on the issues they do? I draw from social movement studies, organizational studies, and social psychology to explain why WNOs shift attention over time to one particular grievance domain: borders- and immigration-related issues. I propose a cognitive-environmental theory of attention shifts and argue that WNOs are more likely to shift attention to borders and immigration when there is a grievance-validating external shock that is likely to be interpreted as a threat. Using a unique dataset of digitized WNO literature between 1980 and 2008 and a combination of computational text analysis and panel models, I find that white nationalist organizations in this sample were more likely to shift attention to borders and immigration when there was a high number of non-right-wing terror threats or attacks in the U.S. in the previous year relative to the size of the organization’s non-Hispanic/Latinx community. I conclude with implications for work on attentional selection and the evolution of discursive fields.

Human-automated collectives: Automating communication for social movement mobilization

Central to algorithmically mediated activism is the politics of algorithmic (in)visibility. Activists must consider how they can increase the visibility of their claims. Bringing together critical data studies and social movement studies, this study introduces the concept of human-automated collectives to capture how activists strategically make collective claims about and through algorithms and mobilize algorithmic tactics on social media. Using Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement as a case study, this study explores how activists interpreted social media algorithms, mobilized others to use various tactics to amplify their voice to gain algorithmic visibility, and contested counter-movement algorithmic strategies. We primarily drew upon a qualitative analysis of two pro-movement Facebook pages that shared algorithmic tactics published between July 2019 and January 2020 ( n = 694). The study contributes to theorizing the role of activists in decoding and contesting automated media for their practical purposes in connective action.

Activist work is care work: conceptualising resistance in Indonesia and the Philippines through feminist ethics

This article draws on interview data collected in 2021 from Indonesia and the Philippines to argue that activist work should fundamentally be understood as care work. The first part of the article advocates for a novel inductive theorisation of intersectional care ethics in social movement studies and activist-centred research. The second part of the article utilises this conceptual framework to discuss the paramount role of women in grassroots activist spaces both on the frontlines and behind the scenes. The stories of resistance by women activists, which comprise the core of this article, help to illustrate how the patriarchy and other structures of power may simultaneously be subverted and reproduced in grassroots community spaces.

Challenging Identity Conflict: How Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary Muslim Organizations Incite Activism

Abstract This article synthesizes new directions taken in the sociology of religion and social movement studies and examines Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary (QTN) Muslim activism in Toronto, Canada. The author argues that Queer Trans and Nonbinary Muslim Organizations (QTNMOs) do more than help reconcile their members’ conflicting identities. Instead, QTNMOs use intersectional frameworks to help QTN Muslims resist intracommunity marginalization in mainstream queer and religious organizations. Findings show that QTNMOs can be considered Social Movement Organizations in three ways: these groups defy culturally embedded institutional norms that are harmful to QTN Muslims, they aim to foster oppositional consciousness, and they incite collective action from their constituents. The article provides a case study of multi-institutional LGBTQ religious activism. The intersectional perspectives of QTN Muslims allow interested sociology of religion and social movements scholars to strengthen the insights gained from each of these fields.

Where ideology meets private interest: the three-part composition of climate obstruction in the United States

Abstract A network of organizations working to oppose climate action, called the climate change countermovement (CCCM), has long been a critical yet highly opaque subject of study for social scientists concerned with climate politics. We leverage a new combined dataset of boards of directors, financial contributions, and texts produced by CCCM members to characterize its sources of support and social structure. We show that foundations tend to make more frequent and larger donations to CCCM nonprofits when they are linked through a board member. We also show that CCCM nonprofits which are more distant from each other in the social network of board members produce different climate change discourses. Community detection methods robustly detect three communities within the CCCM: conservative think tanks (CTT), oil and gas trade associations, and utility, coal, and manufacturing trade associations, each with unique goals within the countermovement. The findings suggest that the climate countermovement is an interface among these communities which together ensure that climate action obstruction is achieved on different but complementary fronts, through both discursive and more concrete policy efforts. This paper also introduces a new way of understanding organized climate obstruction and makes significant methodological contributions in the study of social movements and countermovements.

“We, the parents”: The activist collective identity of parents of LGBTQ individuals in Poland

AbstractObjectiveThe article presents a study on the collective identity of members of the Polish organization “We, the Parents—the association of mothers, fathers, and allies of LGBTQIA individuals.”BackgroundThe research contributes to the field of social movement studies, specifically focusing on the rights of sexual and gender minorities and parental activism, and is grounded in social constructionism.MethodUsing a qualitative case study with an ethnographic approach, the study employed participatory observation, interviews, document analysis, and autoethnography, analyzed through grounded theory.ResultsFindings highlight the cultural roots of the collective identity (“parent”), its interaction with individual identities, and its complex structure, identifying categories such as “accepting parenthood,” “normal parenthood,” “proxy parenthood,” and “intervening parenthood.”ConclusionsThe concept of “parenthood” both strengthens the collective identity and reveals internal tensions. Members engage with diverse audiences, including the public, the LGBTQ community, and power centers, using strategies like promoting “good parenting,” transforming social norms on sexuality and gender, supporting the LGBTQ community, and influencing public discourse on LGBTQ rights. Their modes of expression include narrative, evaluative, performative, and persuasive approaches.ImplicationsThe study offers valuable insights for practitioners in education, health care, and family support, especially in areas with adverse sociocultural climates. It demonstrates how parents adapt after their child's coming out, gain empowerment, and form alliances to improve LGBTQ family well‐being. The research also inspires policy initiatives and public health strategies addressing the mental well‐being and institutional discrimination faced by LGBTQ individuals.