Sociology Of Social Movements Research Articles

The rise of responsible metrics as a professional reform movement: A collective action frames account

Abstract Recent years have seen a rise in awareness around “responsible metrics” and calls for research assessment reforms internationally. Yet within the field of quantitative science studies and in research policy contexts, concerns about the limitations of evaluative bibliometrics are almost as old as the tools themselves. Given that many of the concerns articulated in recent reform movements go back decades, why has momentum for change grown only in the past 10 years? In this paper, we draw on analytical insights from the sociology of social movements on collective action frames to chart the emergence, development, and expansion of “responsible metrics” as a professional reform movement. Through reviewing important texts that have shaped reform efforts, we argue that hitherto, three framings have underpinned the responsible metrics reform agenda: the metrics skepticism framing, the professional-expert framing, and the reflexivity framing. We suggest that although these three framings have coexisted within the responsible metrics movement to date, cohabitation between these framings may not last indefinitely, especially as the responsible metrics movement extends into wider research assessment reform movements.

The prefigurative politics of place-making: Analysis of a neighbourhood-based campaign for a social centre

This article analyses the production of meaning embedded in places through prefigurative practices. Although the use of space by activist groups is widely studied in the sociology of social movements and urban geography, this article extends the body of literature on place-making by analysing the prefigurative dimension between militant practices and living spaces. Drawing on walking interviews with Montreal's activists that campaigned for a social centre in Canada, this article argues that the strategies inform place-making of local grassroots mobilisations that aimed to develop urban alternatives, and that the meaning attributed to places depends on the individual and collective experience of activists engaging in prefigurative politics. In this sense, place-making derives from the lived collective experience therein and the individual's treatment of these spaces. The results show that the repetition of the action, as well as its emotional and symbolic intensity, are factors that favour the contribution of prefigurative practices to the place-making process.

Remembering Nubia’s Past: Space, Generations and Memorial Practices

: This article investigates how Nubian actors establish different memorial practices to transmit their culture and heritage in contemporary Egypt. The aim is to shed light on the heterogeneity of the Nubian community, thereby avoiding the dichotomy of the state official narrative versus a homogenized Nubian narrative. By mobilizing the sociology of collective memory and the sociology of social movements, this article aims to advance more reflection on the complexity of the remembering process. In order to explore how the memorial and cultural practices evolved in the last decade, I first present a historical background to explain to what the Nubian collective memory refers. By presenting critical discussions, I suggest using the space of the Nubian past because it enables us to understand better the dynamics and the diversity of the engaged actors. I highlight the generational factor, in the second part of this article, by illustrating how Nubian Youth are renewing their logics of action.

The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as Solidarity in Postcolonial Anti-Authoritarian Movements in Islamicate South Asia

During India’s Emergency, anti-state poetry of a decidedly amateurish quality proliferated. Anti-Emergency poetry did little to bring about the restoration of democracy, nor could it have reasonably been mistaken for great art. So what was the purpose of writing resistance poetry if it was not meant to directly influence politics nor to be great art? Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world, dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. While until the 19th century Islamicate poetry was tied to the Caliphates who employed poets to extol the virtues of the ruling classes, after the so-called ‘Rise of the West’ Islamicate poetry became associated instead with anti-colonial and anti-state movements across the Islamicate world from Morocco to Indonesia and from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. In this essay, I argue that the utility of resistance poetry in anti-state movements in South Asia has been to build solidarity among social movement participants. The sociology of social movements has long placed emphasis on the role of affective bonds and solidarity building for predicting social movement success, and poetry, in the Islamicate context especially, I argue, does exactly that. By circulating poems, social movement participants inform the reader that resistance and opposition exist, they inspire participants and would-be participants and calm fears that participants might have, especially in moments of political repression. These poems generate emotional and cultural bonds among social movement participants by linking anti-state movements to the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry, thereby fostering solidarity and providing a firm basis for collective action.

The Limits of Rational Choice in the Sociology of Social Movements: The 20 February Movement and the Rif Movement in Morocco

The Limits of Rational Choice in the Sociology of Social Movements: The 20 February Movement and the Rif Movement in Morocco

Presentación del debate: Las consecuencias de los movimientos sociales: Capacidad de agencia y organización social, razones para un debate

The aim of this text is to introduce the debate on the consequences of social movements, its power of agency, and its implications on social organization, in the framework of the Spanish Sociology. This debate is shaped by three articles that we briefly present here, together with some hints about the current state of the debate in the sociology of social movements in Spain.

Lifestyle Movements as Social Networks: The Connections between Everyday Politics and Larger Collective Action in an Indian Feminist Movement

The sociology of social movements has often drawn a fine line between individualistic “lifestyle movements” and more politically oriented collective action. Yet, this distinction belies the fact that seemingly individualistic movements can generate cognitive maps and associational ties necessary for wider mobilization. Drawing on a qualitative study of the Indian men’s feminist movement Men’s Action to Stop Violence against Women (MASVAW), we examine how an ostensibly individualistically oriented lifestyle movement can create the potential for collective action through forging social networks of like-minded individuals who can draw on local knowledge of specific situations to quickly mobilize their peers. Through this, we contribute to the literature on social movement networks by synthesizing theorizing on lifestyle movements with theorizing on activist social networks, demonstrating how networks can shift movements between different modes of coordination, from individualistic and everyday to collective and activist.

Living Labour and Social Movements: A Dialogue with Antonio Negri

In this interview, Antonio Negri first focuses on the possibility of defining the concept of ‘social movement’. By mobilizing a spectrum of references that goes from Carl Schmitt to the Weberian sociology of religion, he insists on the necessity, not to sociologically crystallize the concept, but, instead, to think about it in a historical manner. Social movements would then be attempts at activating ‘liberation processes’, which nowadays can only be thought of within the conditions of financial capitalism. Negri then proceeds to examine the relation between the concept of social movement and those of class and class struggle: he suggests a dynamic and relational interpretation of the Marxian concept of ‘living labour’ as a bridge between a class analysis of society and the study of social movements, movements which in the contemporary landscape are ready to take an ‘entrepreneurial’ connotation. The political and intellectual experience of Italian Workerism in the 1960s is then recalled as a fertile example of the application of this method of social analysis, but also as an exemplification of the principle of ‘unrepeatability’ of social movements. The author finally claims to be a ‘theorist of immaterial labour’ in order to then develop a radical critique of the idea of so-called ‘post-materialist’ movements and of the effects that such a notion has had on the sociology of social movements.

Prehistoric mitochondrial DNA of domesticate animals supports a 13th century exodus from the northern US southwest.

The 13th century Puebloan depopulation of the Four Corners region of the US Southwest is an iconic episode in world prehistory. Studies of its causes, as well as its consequences, have a bearing not only on archaeological method and theory, but also social responses to climate change, the sociology of social movements, and contemporary patterns of cultural diversity. Previous research has debated the demographic scale, destinations, and impacts of Four Corners migrants. Much of this uncertainty stems from the substantial differences in material culture between the Four Corners vs. hypothesized destination areas. Comparable biological evidence has been difficult to obtain due to the complete departure of farmers from the Four Corners in the 13th century CE and restrictions on sampling human remains. As an alternative, patterns of genetic variation among domesticated species were used to address the role of migration in this collapse. We collected mitochondrial haplotypic data from dog (Canis lupus familiaris) and turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) remains from archaeological sites in the most densely-populated portion of the Four Corners region, and the most commonly proposed destination area for that population under migration scenarios. Results are consistent with a large-scale migration of humans, accompanied by their domestic turkeys, during the 13th century CE. These results support scenarios that suggest contemporary Pueblo peoples of the Northern Rio Grande are biological and cultural descendants of Four Corners populations.

The “Datafication” of Teaching: Can Teachers Speak Back to the Numbers?

Teachers face considerable and increasing pressure in their working lives. Labor intensification compels teachers to work faster, harder, and longer. However, teachers also experience increasing external control over what they teach and how they teach. These processes are increasingly made possible by the “datafication” of teaching, whereby the educational process is increasingly transformed into numbers that allow measurement, comparison, and the functioning of high-stakes accountability systems linked to rewards and sanctions. Although there is no question that being able to use student assessment data to support learning has an important place in teachers' repertoire of skills, “datafication” refers to the use of data in a way that has become increasingly detached from supporting learning and is much more concerned with the management of teacher performance as an end in itself. This article presents two currents of critical thought in relation to teachers' work, labor process theory and poststructural analyses grounded in the concept of performativity, and discusses them as a way of “making sense” of teachers' work and the “datafication” of teaching, with a particular focus on questions of control and resistance. It seeks to understand why, despite the pressures on teachers, teacher resistance has seldom developed in ways, at times, or on a scale that both experience and theoretical insight might have predicted. There are clearly significant differences between the two perspectives presented in this article, not least in the ways they conceptualize and explain “resistance.” However, common ground is identifiable and the two theoretical approaches can be bridged in a form that can be productive for those seeking to “speak back to the numbers.” In looking to broker this theoretical divide, I argue that frame theory, rooted within the sociology of social movements, can offer a fruitful way of theory bridging, while also providing the basis for a wider politics of transformation. The article offers several examples of grassroots initiatives formed to oppose standardized testing in England that provide practical examples of this “ideas work” in action.

La búsqueda del cambio social en la era digital: Activismo y expresión pública en Internet

Publicación académica y científica, arbitrada e indizada, editada conjuntamente entre la Universidad del Rosario de Colombia, la Universidad de los Andes de Venezuela y la Universidad Complutense de Madrid de España. La revista publica aportes originales y relevantes en el campo de la comunicación social, específicamente en las líneas de: (i) Sociedad y Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación; (ii) Comunicación y Política; (iii) Periodismo; y (iv) Comunicación y Cultura.

Espacio público, desacuerdos y desigualdades: la expresión pública de los activistas en internet

This article reports some findings of a study about the online public expression by activists in a local context. The objective of this paper is to explore some challenges of online communication practices to the concept of public space. There are a short description of media and ICT’s context in different levels: global, Latin American, national, and local. The theoretical framework in communication, from a sociocultural perspective, dialogues with sociology of social movements and political philosophy. The methodological approach was ethnography, with two activist groups in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in three spaces of communication: internet, the streets, and the media. The data collection methods included virtual ethnography, semi-structured interviews, participative observation, and media monitoring. In this text, I present three main findings: 1) visibility of online public expression by activists has different logics, it is related with specific social situations and with the logics of the activist communities; 2) communication could be understood as a space of differences, activists have their very own worldviews and those are generally opposed to the dominant worldviews; 3) communication could be understood too as a space of inequalities, activist access to public expression in conditions of inequalities and asymmetries. These findings contribute to the discussion about public space in the global age.

Popular music as an anticipation, “framing” and construction of generational memory of the 1968 students’ protest in Yugoslavia

By focusing on the role of music within a certain political event - in this case, the students? protests in Yugoslavia in June 1968 - I connect the sociology of music with the sociology of social movements as defined by American writers Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison. Moreover, I suggest further research based on the sociology of generations. I insist on the cultural basis of social movements, as argued by these Yale-educated sociologists. Contrary to the typically onesided or negative evaluation on the consequences of the 1968 protests on the further development of Yugoslav society, I discuss the importance of this crucial year on the history of Yugoslav rock music and the students? lifestyle. I argue that the entertainment institutions in Yugoslavia, including rock?n?roll, pop and jazz music, as well as the amateur folklore societies, were crucial for the selfidentification of the protagonists of the 1960s student protests, and not only the students? political choices. Music anticipated and accompanied the 1968 protests, and later helped in constructing the memories on these protests. Music is singled out as the object of study based on the analysis of a vast body of archival material and the participants? testimonies, in which the music could be observed as the only constant parameter in the process of constructing collective memory to the 1960s in Yugoslavia and the 1968 events. I discuss music in the context of social movements for the sake of analyzing the multiplicity of music?s meanings for various social groups. Music is seen outside of institutional frameworks. Bearing in mind the lack of literature that deals comprehensively with the lifestyle of the youth at that time, including their musical preferences, I used various secondary sources.

Acción colectiva y movimientos sociales en las redes digitales. Aspectos históricos y metodológicos

The shift in certain episodes of collective action towards the communications landscape and, more specifically, towards the new technology and digital media space, has led to the emergence of a complex variety of sociological phenomena, challenging some of the legacy of theoretical assumptions about the sociology of social movements. Moreover, the types of interaction and intertwining between these social movements and communication technology networks depends on multiple factors. Analysing them from this perspective allows historical periods to be distinguished and classified analytically. Similarly, the well known fact of the emergence of new forms of collective action and unconventional political participation entails the development of research methods that depart in some respects from those traditionally used. In this paper we aim to present some of the methodological tools of this virtualization of political protest, such as Audience Studies or Virtual Ethnography, which are valid sociological research methods to analyse some contemporary cases of collective action. One of the particularities of social movements using new digital media is the need to rethink the methodological approach to their comprehension due to their sporadic, dynamic and fluid nature.

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach

The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.

Review Article: Sociology of Social Movements

Review Article: Sociology of Social Movements

Per una teoria dialettica del rapporto tra movimenti e sistema sociale: communitas, immunitas, individuazione e azione collettiva

The aim of this article is to develop a theoretical basis of the concept of social movement looking outside from the sociology of social movements. The article is set on an epistemological sphere that's close to ontology, and not about causal analysis of social movements. The theoretical question which this paper tries to answer is: What is a social movement? Movements are here defined as social systems, on the basis of the central thesis of the theory of systems, which states that the basis of a system is founded on the differentiation from its environment. The article proceeds with the individualization of fundamental characteristics of movement-systems. First, through the analysis of concepts of immunitas and communitas, which are correlated with the construction of social order and the creation of social movements. Secondly, analyzing the correlations between social movements and the creation of the individual subjectivity, referring to the theories of philosophical anthropology. At last, the article investigates the forms of relationship between movements and social systems: reaction, change of sign and assumption of generalization.

Climate Change, Vector-borne Disease and Interdisciplinary Research: Social Science Perspectives on an Environment and Health Controversy

Over the last two decades, the science of climate change's theoretical impacts on vector-borne disease has generated controversy related to its methodological validity and relevance to disease control policy. Critical social science analysis, drawing on science and technology studies and the sociology of social movements, demonstrates consistency between this controversy and the theory that climate change is serving as a collective action frame for some health researchers. Within this frame, vector-borne disease data are interpreted as a symptom of climate change, with the need for further interdisiplinary research put forth as the logical and necessary next step. Reaction to this tendency on the part of a handful of vector-borne disease specialists exhibits characteristics of academic boundary work aimed at preserving the integrity of existing disciplinary boundaries. Possible reasons for this conflict include the leadership role for health professionals and disciplines in the envisioned interdiscipline, and disagreements over the appropriate scale of interventions to control vector-borne diseases. Analysis of the competing frames in this controversy also allows identification of excluded voices and themes, such as international political economic explanations for the health problems in question. A logical conclusion of this analysis, therefore, is the need for critical reflection on environment and health research and policy to achieve integration with considerations of global health equity.

Social movements: A poststructuralist reading.

The present article tries to rethink social movements from a poststructuralist position, going beyond Synthesis Theory. For the last twenty years the synthesis of the theories of Resource Mobilization, Political Opportunity and Cognitive Framing has been taken to be the last word in the sociology of social movements. Nevertheless, far from being any sort of advance, Synthesis Theory has merely perpetuated previous theories, without, in my opinion,managing to reconceptualize the constitution of power, or the force and embodiment of movement. The lack of theoretical attention to the definition of movement is a curious absence which needs to be redressed . My aim is approach it not from the notion of "subject" or any other type of "institution", but rather in terms of the contingencies of everyday life.   

Women's Health Transnational Networks

The emergence and diffusion of global networks working around health issues with a gender perspective (gender & health organizations) is a relatively new phenomenon characterizing the last three decades with growing interest in gender studies, sociology of health and sociology of social movements. A transnational dimension seems to be more fit to negotiate women's different conditions and interests – compared to traditional ones, whose actions remain limited to national arenas. We carried out exploratory research of about 284 international health-related organizations. Here we are going to present the results of a quantitative survey of 48 of them, dealing specifically on women and gender inequalities, and the outcomes of a qualitative investigation on 2 of them. In this essay, we focus on transnational organizations' missions, activities and strategies.