Social Movement Literature Research Articles

Unpacking linguistic devices and discursive strategies in online social movement organizations: Evidence from anti-vaccine online communities

This study investigates linguistic devices and discursive strategies employed by online social movement organizations (SMOs) in attempts to deinstitutionalize long-standing, institutionalized behaviors. The research draws from an in-depth analysis of public discourse within anti-vaccine online communities in Italy and contributes to the social movement literature on framing and the theory of discursive institutionalization. It employs semi-automated text-analysis methods and interpretive analysis of textual data from seven anti-vaccine social media communities, before and subsequent to the 2017 regulatory intervention of the Italian government to increase vaccination rates. This intervention followed a phase of intense debate centered on the decrease in vaccination coverage and the spread of anti-vaccine ideas in social media as well as in the broader public discourse. The study analyzes the discursive strategies and linguistic devices of community leaders (moderators) and followers (members), and investigates shifts in micro-level online anti-vaccine discursive strategies that developed after the government regulation. The findings suggest that anti-vaccine online SMOs employ specific sets of linguistic devices, namely rhetorical fallacies, that support well-defined discursive strategies such as those aiming to delegitimize actors that endorse vaccines. Furthermore, the evidence shows that these linguistic devices and discursive strategies, after the government regulation, shift from an evidence-based stance towards values and emotions-based argumentations.

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

Protesting the police: an analysis of the correlates of support for police reform following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests

ABSTRACT The social movement literature has long recognized a disjunct between how the public evaluates a protest’s message and means. Even during times of heightened sympathy for a protest’s message – such as occurred following George Floyd’s murder – the public can remain critical of a protest movement itself. In this study, we examine the correlates of support for a range of police reforms following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. We find that support for police reform varies widely based upon the specific reform. Moreover, we find perceptions of the means and makeup of the protestors – how they protest and who they are – influence support for their message. Further, we find that support for police reform is affected by a respondent’s individual characteristics and prior beliefs about race and policing. This study deepens our understanding of the relationship between how the means and ends of social movements are perceived.

Organising outsourced workers in UK’s new trade unionism - emotions, protest, and collective identity

ABSTRACT Drawing on the literature of social movements and emotions, this article analyses a case of the union-led movement against outsourcing in the UK. Our focus is on the emotional processes of collective identity formation and the movement culture of new grassroot unions, addressing the themes of movement culture, collective identity and political solidarity. Data consists of participant observations, interviews, and additional website and media material. The results show that the movement culture of the new grassroot unions is characterised by direct action and a collective identity based on a proud re-centring of BAME workers as subjects of labour struggles. Key emotional processes consist of sharing emotions of humiliation, anger, and exclusion, but also joy and feelings of solidarity. A crucial part of the movement’s expansion is due to the construction of political solidarity and coalition-building. The results demonstrate the importance of heeding the crucial mobilising power of shared emotions in the analysis of new labour unions. The article contributes to labour movement research with an enhanced understanding of immaterial claims on dignity, respect and care, alongside the cognitivist focus on material work conditions and labour rights.

Facebook and the Surveillance Assemblage: Policing Black Lives Matter Activists & Suppressing Dissent

This article outlines the “social media surveillance assemblage” (Trottier 2011: 63) on Facebook, including its deployment against social activists. In particular, it traces intersecting, dynamic, and opaque data flows among Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement that undermine Black Lives Matter activists and suppress social dissent in the United States. Sources of data include interviews with academics, lawyers, and researchers as well as an in-depth examination of platform policies, Freedom of Information Act requests/lawsuits, and news articles. Theories of the surveillance assemblage (Trottier 2011), the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019) frame the interviews and documents, demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of social media surveillance. Providing an interdisciplinary focus, this article engages with the fields of private policing, surveillance studies, and social movements literature. The article’s empirical data contribute to the existing literature by stressing the role of third parties and providing insights into the nontransparent system of surveillance on social media.

Residents' collective strategies of resistance in Global South cities' informal settlements: Space, scale and knowledge

This paper examines the strategies of resistance articulated by residents of informal settlements response to urban exclusion. Building upon resistance and urban social movements literature the paper is informed by the case of the Villa Rodrigo Bueno in Buenos Aires, a self-constructed villa miseria, and its residents' stories of resistance to attempts of evictions and upgrading programs. In the paper we show how resistance is mobilized, first through its simultaneous disconnection, due to its remoteness and isolation; and reconnection to local and global supportive networks. While disconnection facilitated self-construction, densification and the blooming of informal entrepreneurship; reconnection through relational and multiscalar sites enabled unexpected encounters with distant actors that contributed to resist evictions. Second, the long-term learning and development of self-knowledge (i.e. construction, or housing law), embedded in the remoteness of the informal settlement, contributed to shift expertise from city officers to residents; redefining the role of informal residents into active citizens and experts in policy making, and turning informal settlements into settings of wider social change.

Bridging theories of social and revolutionary movements

AbstractHow can theories of social movements and revolutions help us understand the rise of collective action, their tactical and strategic choices, and their prospects for succeeding? By reviewing past and recent developments in the literature of social movements and revolutions, I argue that in comparison with social movements scholars, structuralists of revolutions more accurately used theories of threat and breakdown in understanding what triggers revolutions and revolutionary situations. Nevertheless, because scholars of revolutions usually distinguish types of revolutions based on outcomes after supposed clear endings, they have missed important insights from the literature on movement continuity that might guide us towards new understandings of revolutions. Moreover, both fields have followed similar paths in terms of contributions and gaps in the study of emotions, spontaneity, tactics, and repression in collective action.

Bring Your Own Politics: Life Strategies and Mobilization in Response to Urban Redevelopment

This article contributes to social movement literature and theories of strategic action by making the case for an analytic distinction between habitual and intentional life strategies, namely the ways in which people pursue what they value in life. Housing strategies are one example of life strategies. The distinction helps explain how political players, including social movements, bring about social change (or preserve the status quo) by changing or reinforcing people’s minds and their preferred ways of action. They can achieve their goals by first recognizing these habitual strategies, and then prompting people to articulate or adjust them during interactive, group-level situations. My analysis relies on a qualitative study of Renovation, a controversial urban renewal project in Moscow. I examine how Muscovites revisited, articulated and sometimes revised their housing strategies in response to the surprising, and for some, shocking announcement of the relocation project.

The Cultural Outcomes of Social Movements: A Computational Linguistics Approach

Scholars have long established the importance of the cultural outcomes of social movements in the context of political power and representation. However, they have also acknowledged the methodo-logical difficulties associated with studying cultural outcomes, especially when culture is manifested through linguistic practices. This paper addresses the potential for dealing with movements and culture as mani-fested in symbols, public discourse, narratives, and rhetoric and makes two contributions: It links the social movement literature studying culture through language with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for systematic and comprehensive cultural analysis; and introduces a state-of the-art method which pro-vides a better understanding of language change and linguistic influence given the capacity of computa-tional analyses to process large volumes of data for multiple actors and varied data sources during long pe-riods of time. The paper describes the cultural influence of women organizations in Spain between 2000-2020 on issues such as gender inequalities, abortion, gender violence, prostitution, and surrogacy. Tweets and manifestos by women's organizations', as well as national press coverage of women issues and inter-ventions by MPs in the parliamentary arena, are used to describe the advantages and limitations of the method for the study of cultural outcomes. Computational linguistics provides new possibilities for scholarly research on cultural outcomes of social movements but also shows that these methods should be accompa-nied by precise definitions of cultural outcomes, detailed and replicable operationalisation processes, and theoretical models that identify the mechanisms that explain the linguistic phenomena that underly cultural change.

Conspiracy theories and social movements studies: A research agenda

AbstractIt is surprising to note the scarcity of contributions in social movement literature related to so‐called conspiracy theories. A considerable amount of the work on these topics has been produced in political science, history, media studies, social psychology and other disciplines. These accounts have often adopted a stigmatizing approach, looking at conspiracy theories as forms of pathologies (whether psychological, social or political). Moving from such a perspective to a constructivist one, I argue that conspiracy theories should represent an object of interest for social movement scholars: conspiracies supporters go into the streets to highlight their issues, protest against authority, propose alternative lifestyles and often claim to look for a better/different society. Applying the social movements toolkit can allow to better understand this phenomenon and apply critical perspectives in a more effective manner. On the basis of this premise, the first part of this article reviews the existing literature on conspiracy theories, also identifying the main lacunae; the second part outlines some possible research questions and lines of inquiry, moving beyond the classical theories in the field of social movement studies. The paper also introduces a number of new concepts, such as conspiracy mobilizations and conspiracy coalitions.

The impact of moral injury on social movements: the demobilization of Jordan’s ‘Arab Spring’ protestors

ABSTRACT This article draws on the psychological construct of moral injury to examine the demobilization – and lack of remobilization – of Jordan’s ‘Arab Spring’ protests. It argues that unforeseen failures during these protests created morally injurious events that resulted in cognitive dissonance among novice participants. The dissonance led to two distinct outcomes. Older novices were better able to resolve the dissonance and, as a result, did not develop moral injury and typically remained active in the movements. However, the younger novice participants proved less able to resolve the dissonance, which resulted in the development of symptoms of moral injury. These symptoms typically led to reduced participation, an exit from social movements, and an unlikeliness to remobilize. Through its examination of Jordan’s ‘Arab Spring’, the article introduces moral injury into the social movement literature, thereby helping to address the under-developed connection between emotions and social movement demobilization.

Affective solidarity: how guilt enables cross-generational support for political radicalization in Hong Kong

AbstractThe extant social movement literature tends to regard the youth as radical actors and senior citizens as conservative actors. However, the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong exhibited strong solidarity among protesters across generations, despite the radicalization of protest actions over an extended period. These phenomena contradict Hong Kong's traditional political culture, which favors peaceful and orderly protests and the worldwide trend where radicalization often leads to internal division in movements. By analyzing the data collected from onsite protest surveys in December 2019 and January 2020 (N= 1,784), this paper presents the mediating role of guilt in shifting senior citizens from opposing radical actions to supporting them and feeling solidarity with militant protesters. We find that the relationship between age and feelings of guilt is stronger among respondents who experience state repression. The findings shed light on the affective and relational dimensions of protest participation, showing how the traumatic conditions under which different social actors are welded together by shared emotional upheavals facilitate ingroup identification and affective solidarity.

Unlikely Feminist Coalitions: Islamist and Secularist Women’s Organizing in Tunisia

AbstractFollowing the 2010–2011 revolution, Islamist and secularist political parties and women’s rights organizations formed coalitions in Tunisia. Nothing of the sort had happened before in Tunisian history. This article considers the conditions that led feminists with different ideological beliefs to create what I call an “unlikely feminist coalition” in Tunisia. I argue that Islamists and secularists can form unlikely feminist coalitions when facing similar threats, working on similar tasks prior to formation of the coalition, the experience of common grievances, and a shared feminist identity. Drawing on the gender politics and social movement literature on coalitions, I suggest that more needs to be understood about unlikely feminist coalitions, especially in the Middle East.

A Comparison Between Hobsbawm’s and Bayat’s Views on Non-Western Social Movements

Until the 1960s, literature on social movements had been limited to such movements that emerged in the West in the modern period-. These movements had organizational structures and leaders and contributed to a revolution. This narrow framework contained parallelisms to the progressive theory of history and modernization theory. Researchers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel de Certeau and James Scott, and approaches such as ‘history from below,’ subaltern studies and post-colonial theory played a key role in expanding and enriching views on social movements. Eric Hobsbawm’s studies on social movements in both pre-modern Europe and contemporary Latin America and Asef Bayat’s studies on contemporary Middle Eastern social movements have contributed to the expansion of the field by going beyond the boundaries of the social movements’ literature inspired by modernization theory. In this article, Hobsbawm’s and Bayat’s studies on social movements are discussed comparatively, though the continuity between them is emphasized., Both their philosophical and theoretical foundations as well as their concepts and typologies are examined in the context of their contributions to the literature. Especially in Latin America and Middle East countries, where legal practices and regulations are insufficient and the existing political and bureaucratic mechanisms cannot represent the public, there are social movements that create a ‘passive revolution’ in Gramscian sense. Indeed, both Hobsbawm and Bayat studied non-Western social movements that were unorganized, leaderless, without a manifesto and non-revolutionary in the first place. Thus, by emphasizing different forms of social movement and opposition, they contributed to the critique of Eurocentric and modernist prejudices in the literature of social movements.

“A Moment of Science, Please”: Activism, Community, and Humor at the March for Science

In April 2017, scientists and science sympathizers held marches in the United Kingdom as part of a coordinated international March for Science movement that was held in over 600 cities worldwide. This article reports from participant-observation studies of the marches that took place in London and Cardiff. Supplemented with data from 37 interviews from marchers at the London event, the article reports on an analysis of the placards, focusing on marchers’ concerns and the language and images through which they expressed those concerns. How did the protesters articulate their concerns and objectives, and how were these articulations used to build a community? The placards did not represent a clear, focused, and unifying message; they instead illustrated disparate concerns ranging from human-induced climate change, Trump and “alternative facts,” and local UK specific political issues concerning the country’s exit from the European Union. Our analysis shows that placards gave a playful and whimsical character to the march, with slogans displaying significant amounts (and moments) of humor, often formulated through insider jokes, scientific puns, or self-deprecating appropriation of negative stereotypes about scientists. We analyze the march through the social movement literature and as a collective identity-building exercise for an (emergent) community of scientists and sympathizers with long-term aims of establishing a louder voice for scientists, and experts, in public discourse.

The October 2019 Protest Movement in Iraq. An Analysis of the 'Early Moments' of the Mobilisation

On 1 October 2019, a wide-ranging anti-government protest took to the streets in Baghdad. Grievances included unemployment, a lack of basic services, the absence of social justice, and endemic corruption in political and economic institutions. Despite swift and severe state repression, the protest snowballed into a countrywide mobilisation encompassing the central-southern governorates to become the largest protest movement to challenge Iraq's post-2003 political order. By granting analytical weight to the role of early riser activists, this paper focuses on the factors that shaped activists' decisions and lead to different forms of spontaneous participation involving both sympathisers and bystanders. In so doing, it draws attention to the non-hierarchical structure of the movement and its diffused communication strategy, the repression as a moral shock and the rhetoric of protest slogans. At the crossroads between social movement studies and Iraqi studies, this article contributes to both bodies of scholarship with empirical research. On one hand, it enriches social movement literature by shedding light on strategies and actions adopted by activists operating in non-liberal contexts. On the other hand, it enriches Iraqi political studies by demonstrating that the country hosts a vibrant sphere of contentious politics, a sphere that deserves ample scrutiny.

Populist Framing Mechanisms and the Rise of Right-wing Activism in Brazil

ABSTRACTThis article presents an analysis of the use of populist framing mechanisms by grassroots right-wing organizations. It brings together the social movement literature on framing and the populist literature to understand how actors build an emergent field of activism in a highly contentious context. Based on the analysis of a sample of 4,574 Facebook posts published by 5 civil society organizations during the campaign to oust Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, it argues that two mechanisms, reductionism and antagonism, enabled actors to focus on similar targets and diagnostics while maintaining relevant differences when seeking to motivate followers and present prognostic frames. These were key mechanisms used by all the actors, albeit with different contents, depending on the frame task. This article contributes to filling gaps in the framing and populist literatures and sheds light on the relevance of populist communication in the rise of right-wing activism.

We Get Them Running Through Walls: Strategizing Via an Indignation-Based Moral Battery

Based on 18 months of multi-method ethnographic research, and drawing from the social movement literature, we theorize a process model of how complex emotions are harnessed through organization-lev...

The Fair Process Counter-Effect: Procedural Justice and Protests in China’s School Admissions Reform

How does procedural justice influence protest emergence? This question has been neglected as the procedural justice and social movement literatures have taken disparate approaches to explain people’s response to substantive injustices. This paper fills this gap by developing a theory of fair process counter-effect, namely that procedural justice facilitates collective action. Based on longitudinal fieldwork conducted from 2010-2019 on school admissions in China, I find that a bureaucratization reform had the unintended consequences of inducing previously nonexistent collective protests. Characterized by transparency and equal treatment, the post-reform procedures improved procedural justice perception among parents while also inducing protests, as the procedures enabled parents to more directly perceive substantive injustices, use public information to form protest narratives, and mobilize through shared experiences and grievances. By identifying the fair process counter-effect, this study reveals that collective action is facilitated by fair procedures and suppressed by unfair procedures. In doing so, this study bridges the justice-based and mobilization-based perspectives in explaining responses to inequalities.

Social Media for Future: The Use of Collective Emotions in Online Social Movement Campaigns

Social media is a powerful tool to spread news and influence others. In fact, 71% of Americans use the Twitter platform to get their news (Shearer and Matsa, 2018). This study uses the context of Greta Thunberg and the global FridaysForFuture climate strike movement to understand which types of communication are most likely to be engaged with by users. Through this paper, we aim to contribute to the social movements literature by introducing sentiment and collective emotions. We find that longer tweets containing images and video content tend to be more liked and retweeted. We also found that negative tweets tend to be more effective. In terms of collective emotions, tweets evoking disgust and sadness are the most effective. Contrasting prior studies, positive emotions, anger, and fear are not significantly effective in gaining awareness online.