Social Movement Studies Research Articles

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.

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.

Giving Voice: Examining the Tactical Repertoires of Nonprofit Advocacy for Disadvantaged Populations

Abstract Representation is an important role of the nonprofit sector as these organizations can give voice to the priorities of their constituents. This is particularly important for disadvantaged communities that may lack access to traditional democratic processes. What advocacy tactics are most utilized by nonprofit organizations serving disadvantaged populations? Given variation in nonprofit advocacy tactics, which tactics are perceived as most effective? To answer these questions, we look to the framework of tactical repertoires from sociological studies of social movements. Analysis of a survey of New England nonprofits (N = 656, 55 % response rate) indicates that nonprofits serving disadvantaged populations use similar tactics to organizations advocating for other constituencies but employ them at higher rates. These tactics cluster into three tactical repertoires, each a different combination of advocacy tactics. Perceptions of advocacy effectiveness are associated with the size and nature of tactical repertoires, client participation in advocacy, government funding, and perceptions of the policy environment.

Protest and Legislative Behavior in Perilous Times

Abstract A long-standing tradition in the study of social movements documents the multitude of ways protest “matters” for policy and politics. LaGina Gause's book, The Advantage of Disadvantage makes a contribution to this literature. Gause develops a formal theory of the influence of protest on legislative behavior and representation and tests it with data from a range of empirical sources. She finds that protest is most effective for disadvantaged groups. What is admirable here is the attempt to integrate the study of social movements with the study of legislative behavior. But limitations that result from an exclusive reliance on quantitative analysis ultimately weaken the strength of her claims. That said, given the proliferation of protest movements around the world, we need to better understand how movement politics influence legislative politics. This is especially true for the mature democracies of the West where Far Right, nationalist, racist, and fascist movements seek to move from fringe to center by manipulating the institutions of electoral politics to undermine democracy itself. The review article concludes with thoughts on an expanded inquiry into the dynamics of contention of today's rightwing political movements.

Living in Legends: Frames, Legends and the Conflict over the Hamburg Hafenstraße, 1981–1995

Abstract During the 1980s, a conflict over eight occupied houses in the Hafenstraße in Hamburg developed into one of the most contested squatter struggles in West Germany and strongly resonated with squatters abroad. As the conflict escalated, a long-drawn-out discussion unfolded between Hamburg’s squatters, authorities, media and inhabitants over who the squatters were and how the city should deal with them. This article sets out to explain why these eight buildings became such a potent symbol for so many different groups. In order to do so, it combines social movement studies methods with folklore studies approaches and analyses the Hafenstraße as a site of legend, as a canvas onto which various actors projected societal hopes, ideals and fears. Central to this analysis are the four main legendary tropes that circulated in the 1980s: the Hafenstraße as a refuge for young dropouts, as a lawless zone, as a haven for terrorists and as indicative of the city’s governance crisis. Finally, it asks how such legends informed people’s actions and explains the importance of these tropes in the escalation and resolution of the conflict.

The Emerging of Patron-Client Relationship in Contemporary Peasant Social Movement Articulation

This paper is a literature review in the study of contemporary peasant social movements. Peasant social movements, especially in Indonesia, are always interesting because of the complex problems that have yet to be resolved. This paper uses a qualitative method with an Integrated Literature Review (ILR) approach. The search for article data was carried out using the Google Scholar database using the keywords: "peasant social movements", "articulation", and "patron-client relationships". Furthermore, articles were sorted based on predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Articles that have been obtained are then extracted. The study results show that in articulating their interests, peasants often do so by using a combination of internal organizational networks known as resource mobilization theory and external activism better known as political opportunity theory cluster. Articulating their interests through subsequent social movement actors gives rise to patron-client relationships between them. In conclusion, we argue that the emergence of patron-client relationships has an impact on the articulation of interests through social movement actors.

Protests in urban environments: review and research agenda

Abstract Although knowledge about the role of space in the field of social movement studies is already well established, it is rarely discussed within the framework of urban spatial design (with some important exceptions). We consider not only how political power is related to architectural design in urban environments but also how it is performed (and contested) during protests within these spaces. We argue that urban spatial planning should address the dual nature of street demonstrations. Public assemblies are seen as symbols of democracy, but they are also disruptive and may turn into riots. This tension is evident along two design lines: facilitating and obstructing street demonstrations in a built-up urban environment. In our essay, we show that street protests are an immanent part of neoliberal democracy, and that cities cannot avoid street demonstrations or simply exclude them in the design process.

Hybrid Movements, Digital Technology, and the Rise and Fall of Far-Right Islamist Protest Mobilization in Indonesia

What explains the rise and fall of far-right Islamist protest mobilization in contemporary Indonesia? The 2016-2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election witnessed significant growth in support for and mobilization of the far-right. While far-right Islamist mobilization has occurred regularly since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, its longevity and impact on electoral politics has historically been limited. I maintain that the 2016 far-right Islamist protest mobilization was enabled and disabled by the dynamic relationship between hybrid media and hybrid movement strategies. Hybrid thinking serves as a platform for understanding the increasingly diverse and complex nature of Islamist mobilization, generating new ways of exploring some of the classic concerns of social movement studies and technology. Moreover, previous research on the far-right primarily focuses on electoral and party politics, while studies on social movements and technologies often fall into technological determinism, providing only a limited understanding of one of the most pressing issues of our time. This study proposes an innovative analytic strategy to understand the complexity of contemporary Islamist protest mobilization, creating a hybrid movement that effectively spans different movements, constituencies, and institutions, all coexisting within a hybrid media environment that deftly merges elements of old and newer media logics to influence participation, collaboration, and coordination in the spheres of social movements and protest politics.

Repertoires of action and collective memory: the re-emergence of feminist self-managed health centers in Italy

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the relationship between repertoires of action and collective memory by exploring the re-emergence of feminist self-managed health centers in Italy. These were a key form of action of 1970s feminism in the country, which rapidly disappeared after the institution of state-based Family Health Centers. In the last decades, feminist and transfeminist self-managed health centers have resurfaced in several Italian cities. The present article investigates the mnemonic dynamics underpinning the re-adoption of a form of action from the past in subsequent cycles of mobilization. Social movement scholars have stressed the relatively stable and repetitive character of the repertoire of collective action over time, considering it as part of an implicit memory. The article examines a case in which the discontinuous adoption of a form of action makes its retrieval by subsequent activists the result of active memory work. While the study of social movements and collective memory has grown considerably in the last decades, the study of repertoires remains largely under-researched in this field. Filling this gap, this study shows how, by adopting a symbolically and historically meaningful repertoire, activists re-elaborate their collective identity in the present and establish a relationship with previous cycles. It suggests that further research should investigate the relationship between collective memory and repertoires of action.

How Does Social Media as Tools for Social Movements on Global Issues? A Systematic Literature Review

This study aimed to map the development of research and scientific publications about social movements on social media. This study used the Systematic Literature Review approach to analyze 471 scientific articles that were selected based on the PRISMA procedure. The articles were taken from the Scopus database published in the 2018-2023 period. Cite Space software was used to visualize the data such as topic clusters, authors, and topic trends in the study of social movements on social media. This study reveals that there are ten topic clusters in the study of social movements on social media, namely collective action (#0), long covid (#1), stock market (#2), umbrella movement (#3), social media (#4 ), environmentally-related migration (#5), racial justice (#6), extreme events (#7), influence odoj (#8), sexual abuse (9#), and systems research (10#). Collective action is the most dominant cluster compared to other clusters, which shows that collective action is a general concept used in the study of social movements on social media, which is related to various issues in other clusters, such as Covid-19, politics, racism, and the stock market. Each topic cluster was discussed by many authors with various study focuses, but all authors used the concept of social media as a social movement to explain the issues that were the focus of their respective studies. Trend topics in the study of social movements on social media show that social movements and social media are a unified concept that can be used to explain various issues to study. This research contributes to the development of social movement studies in the digital era, the internet, mobility networks, and artificial intelligence. The limitation of this research is that the data used were from the Scopus database only so the findings cannot fully explain the study of social movements on social media. Therefore, future research needs to use data or references from other reputable databases such as the Web of Science and EBSCO.

Da’wah Bil hal: A Study of Muhammadiyah's Social Movements in Wolo During the Political Dynamics of the Old and New Order Eras

Da’wah Bil hal: A Study of Muhammadiyah's Social Movements in Wolo During the Political Dynamics of the Old and New Order Eras

Новые социальные движения во Франции как исторический феномен и социологическая концепция

The term “new social movements” refers both to new forms of mobilization that appeared in the 1960s, and to a set of theoretical works in the field of social movements analysis. This article examines various theoretical approaches to the study of new social movements, presented by A. Touraine, С. Castoriadis, M. de Certeau, P. Champagne. It is noted that nowadays the theory of new social movements is being criticized. Despite the fact that the social movements of the 1970s in France contributed to the emergence of a new theoretical approach to their study, many aspects of their novelty may be disputed. Moreover, the year 1968 had a lasting impact on changes in the culture and behavior of the French, and also gave rise to a generation of activists inclined to invest their energy in the activities of social movements. By interrogating the historical roots, theoretical foundations, and modern manifestations of new social movements, scholars can contribute to a deeper understanding of the dynamics shaping modern social movements.